


Our Perceived Realities

by SkyisGray



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Identity Porn, M/M, Negative self-image, Period-typical views of homosexuality and masculinity, Typical Stucky trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:10:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyisGray/pseuds/SkyisGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes has always lived at the edge of Steve’s map.  From grade school to church to this foul-smelling dock job, where Bucky heaves crates around and Steve counts figures in the dark, cool office, they’ve always been close enough to be aware of each other but too far to strike up any real friendship.  </p><p>They’ve lived in the same neighborhood among the same stock of beaten-down Irish immigrants their whole lives, and they’ve had three proper conversations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Perceived Realities

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Steve/Bucky story that starts out pre-serum. It is slightly AU in that the boys don’t live in each other’s pockets at the beginning of the story, but have no fears, they’ll get there.
> 
> Thank you to my wonderful Beta, [Aidontloveyou](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aidontloveyou)  
> All remaining mistakes are certainly mine.

Bucky Barnes has always lived at the edge of Steve’s map.  From grade school to church to this foul-smelling dock job, where Bucky heaves crates around and Steve counts figures in the dark, cool office, they’ve always been close enough to be aware of each other but too far to strike up any real friendship. 

They’ve lived in the same neighborhood among the same stock of beaten-down Irish immigrants their whole lives, and they’ve had three proper conversations.

Once, at school, Bucky hadn’t been able to diagram sentences for beans, and Steve had offered to do the assignment for him.  He knows it’s probably his fault that Bucky still doesn’t know how to do it, unless some kind, smart girl has taught him since.  But he doesn’t really care, because Bucky had flipped through his sketchbook and heaped enough praise on Steve’s drawing skills that his cheeks flared red all day. 

Another time, Bucky had drunkenly stumbled upon Steve getting beat-up behind a bar, and he’d rolled up his sleeves and thrown himself at Steve’s attackers.  Walking home, with Steve’s black eye and Bucky’s bleeding nose, they’d talked about the fight and each other’s moves and what a prick Joey McConnell is. 

The last time, Steve’s favorite time, Bucky had been on a date with a girl and her homelier, trailing best friend.  Bucky had spotted Steve across the diner, and his eyes had lit up.  “Perfect, my friend Steve just got here!  He can show Kate a good time.”  And that’s how Steve had ended up on his first and only date, keeping shy, awkward Kate company while Bucky romanced her prettier and livelier friend.  Bucky had thanked Steve at the end of the night when the girls walked off, arm-in-arm, and told him that he’d be a ladykiller yet.   

(Steve remembers every word.  He also remembers every time they’ve sat in the same pew at church, and every time they’ve nodded at each other silently as their paths crossed on the street, and every time Bucky’s picked up his pay with a quiet, “Thanks.”  He commits each interaction to memory like a religious experience.)

It scares him sometimes, the way he feels like the bottom drops out of his stomach when he sees Bucky’s messy head in a crowd of workers, or the way he tingles in anticipation and his breathing goes thin hours before he knows Bucky’s going to come in to pick up his dock wages.  He secretly admires several of the men working at the docks – he knows it’s a perversion, but that doesn’t stop him from looking out the windows as the men drip with sweat and pick up cartons weighing more than Steve does – but his want for Bucky is different. 

He thinks about abusing his clerk position.  He thinks about putting extra in Bucky’s pay, because he knows that Bucky has a passel of little nieces and nephews living in his family’s apartment (not that half the men don’t live the same way).  He thinks about skimming off of Bucky’s pay, so that Bucky will quit and stop making Steve want the impossible so damn much.  He thinks about putting a love note, or a poem, or a drawing in Bucky’s envelope.  He thinks about losing the envelopes of the men Bucky doesn’t get along with. 

He thinks and wants and dreams, and he never does anything about it.  What is he supposed to do?  He’s a man, and a pathetic excuse for one at that.  He has no muscle, a list of health problems longer than his arm, and he’s never even kissed anyone.  Bucky’s also a man, the best kind of man, whose sweat-defined muscles move heavy, obstinate things, whose health is never in question, and who takes out a different girl every week. 

Steve knows this for a fact.  Bucky’s building is on Steve’s street, and he has to walk by Steve’s fire escape to pick his dates up.   Sometimes, Steve’s still sitting and drawing on the fire escape when Bucky comes home.  Sometimes, Bucky’s clothes are askew and rumpled, like he was briefly out of them at some point in the night. 

So whatever Steve wants from Bucky, it’s about as likely as Steve’s father coming back to life, getting a job as CEO of U.S. Steel, and whisking Steve and his mother away to live in a mansion in Manhattan. 

And he’s not even sure what he wants. 

Some days, he just wants to get a burger with Bucky and ask him to clarify a thousand little, pointless wonders.  Like whether he uses pomade or tonic in his hair.  If he has any freckles or moles hidden by his clothing.  What his favorite joke is, to hear and to tell. 

Other days, he wants to cook for Bucky while Bucky soaks off grime in the bathtub and rants about his day.  Steve remembers his parents doing this, and sometimes, he’d be sent out to play and he’d come back, and his mother’s hair would be wet. 

Most days, he wants to push his little body against Bucky’s strong one, and he wants Bucky to push back, and with all of this pushing, he wants to end up against some surface that doesn’t give and to just keep pushing and pushing.  And then he wants to kiss Bucky’s saucy mouth, and kiss and push and kiss and push and spill into his pants like he does when he’s alone with just his thoughts and his hand, and Bucky’s heavy on his conscious.

 

He’s daydreaming a little bit as he sorts the punch cards and gets ready for the dock workers to flood into the office and clock out.  It’s the most hectic time of the day, because workers are going off shift and on shift at the same time, and Bucky’s going to be there but Steve rarely even notices him because of the chaos and the sound of the punch machine. 

They descend like locusts on the neatly alphabetized piles, shoving each other and bitching at Steve when their card isn’t immediately at hand.  All of the workers finishing up smell like sweat, and all of the workers clocking in smell like the home-cooked dinner they just ate before hurrying over. 

A few minutes after the worst of the rush, Bucky walks into the office, hair still slicked back and shirt still (relatively) clean.  Steve frowns a little as he pulls the “Barnes, J. B.” card from the pile and silently hands it over. 

Bucky doesn’t look like he’s getting off a shift, so why is he in the office?

“Nights pay better,” Bucky tells him in explanation.  He doesn’t sound excited for the change. 

“Nights are more dangerous,” Steve answers him, both thrilled that the conversation is happening and worried for Bucky working in the dark.  Injuries at the docks almost exclusively happen to night workers.  In the dark, there are all sorts of things to fall over and on.  Steve hopes that Bucky is clever enough to keep sharp. 

“Sister just dropped another kid,” Bucky says conversationally as he punches his card and hands it back to Steve.  “You’re lucky it’s just you.”  Steve’s heart thrums a little at the knowledge that Bucky knows that, but of course, it hurts too.  Sarah’s death is less than a year old, and the wound of losing his mother and best friend is still raw. 

“Just me and a room in Mrs. O’Ryans’.  It’s a 45-minute wait to use the bathroom,” Steve tells him, in case Bucky doesn’t know that.  He can’t believe they’re having conversation number four.  He thought he’d missed Bucky altogether today. 

“I was real sad to hear your ma died,” Bucky says like he’s run his own words through his head and realized that they made him sound like an insensitive ass.  He reaches for his punch card again, and then pulls his hand back when he remembers he already punched in.  “Shit, who should I go see if I’m new on this shift?” 

“Go see Dan Kelly; you’ll have to ask for him.”

“Thanks, Steve,” Bucky says with a grin that does devastating things to Steve, and he swaggers out of the office. 

Still struggling to believe that it’d happened, Steve looks down at his desk and sees a mess of punch cards from men who’d been clocking in and out while he was speaking to Bucky.  He’d have sworn on his life that no one else was in the office, but as the evidence shows, he’d just been distracted. 

Before Steve leaves for the day, he makes sure that the safe is securely locked and the punch cards for the morning workers are splayed out alphabetically on the counter.  He tries to catch a glimpse of Bucky through the twilight gloam as he leaves the docks, but all he can see are some shadowy figures moving around on one of the ships. 

Steve itches to draw Bucky as he’d looked in the office today as soon as he gets home, but the boarding house is alive with discord.  One of the toilets is backed up, Mrs. O’Ryan is screaming at a tenant’s door about a broken window, and two cops are standing outside, casually leaning up against the building and smoking. 

Steve bangs on his neighbor Finn’s door as he walks to his own room. 

“Finn, some cops out front for you.”  He hears his neighbor swearing and climbing out of bed.  A second later, the man throws the door open, clad in only his pants.  Steve’s eyes barely wander. 

“This is the biggest bullshit…” he rants as he stomps down the stairs, still shirtless.  Steve figures he really can’t help there, so he goes to the bathroom on the 4th floor and uses the wire hanger stashed behind the toilet in an effort to unclog it. 

Thirty thankless minutes later, Steve has temporarily fixed the bathroom situation and temporarily mediated the argument between tenant and owner.  He finally unlocks his own door to reveal his single room, and he sighs as his stomach rumbles.  Running through his dinner options, he comes up with bread and jam.  Again. 

After he toasts the bread and liberally spreads on strawberry jam, he takes his plate and his sketchbook out to the hallway and uses the window there to climb on to the fire escape.  He eats his dinner with his left hand while using the right to shape curves and lines that will turn into Bucky leaning against his desk.  He wants to capture the exact angle that Bucky had looked down at him from, the exact look on his face as he rationalized his new shift, the exact way that the light bulb behind him had illuminated his hair like a deceptive halo. 

He draws in the cast-off light from the street lamp, squinting at his drawing and restarting several times.  His breath puffs away from him, the November air numbing his fingers slightly through his gloves, but he can’t stop until he gets this down in charcoal.  It’s not every day that Bucky Barnes stops to chat with Steve Rogers.

Or, he would keep it up until the drawing is perfect, but a tap comes from the window, and it’s drawn open before his eyes re-focus on the figure in the lit interior. 

“Steven Rogers, you get in here right now before you catch your death,” Mrs. O’Ryan tells him.  “Your mama would tan you to see out on this rickety fire escape without even a hat.  You let that woman rest in peace and get on inside.”  Steve can’t argue against the mother card, so he submits and heaves himself back through the window.

 

A few weeks after Bucky starts working nights, Steve hears some men gossiping about him.  He’s starved for information about Bucky because the shift change means that he never sees Bucky outside of work and only once a day in the office.  He keeps an eye out on his fire escape on Bucky’s weekly night off (which Steve abashedly looks up in the files), but he doesn’t even seem to be romancing any girls at the moment. 

And it’s important that he knows what Bucky’s coworkers think of him.  Steve is the unseen eyes and ears of the docks, and if there’s going to be trouble, he needs to warn Bucky.  His gut warms at the thought of having a useful reason to go to Bucky. 

“Barnes?  He’s not no fairy.  Haven’t you ever seen him at the dancehall?  Always has a pretty dame with him.” 

“My cousin works at the power plant, and he says, Barnes sometimes hangs around the queer club out there.” 

“How the hell he know that?”  There are some titters.  “Your cousin go to that queer club much?  Does he have a wig, maybe some shoes-”  The man is abruptly cut off, and Steve wonders if he’s about to hear another fight between the riled up workers.  Good; he wants this man who’s spreading lies about Bucky to lose his job.  Even though he damn sure wishes they weren’t lies. 

“Shut up, Jack.  I’m just sayin’, after Barnes went to breakfast with us th’other day, my cousin told me that he’d seen him.  Didn’t say nothin’ else, just that he’d seen him.”

“Aw, hell, he coulda been doin’ anything.”

“I was just suggesting we keep our eye on the guy.  ‘Case he turns out to like us bendin’ over a little too much.”  They move away from the office, speculating about other queers they know, and Steve’s ears ring. 

He knows it isn’t true, but he can’t get the image out of his head.  For the next three nights, he can only draw pictures of Bucky and faceless men.  Kissing, embracing, curling their charcoal bodies close together.  Steve tries to experiment with different body types in the sketches, but he doesn’t deny that his favorites are the ones that feature Bucky and a short, skinny body that drapes so well over his bigger frame. 

Steve’s not an idiot; he burns the sketches in a pan on his stove after he’s finished and stared at them for a few hours.  Even his locked trunk isn’t safe enough for drawings like these.  He feels slightly ashamed for having drawn them, but it’s the only way to stop the flickering movie of images in his head twenty-four/seven. 

He gets his chance to tell Bucky on a Tuesday night, but he doesn’t even know where to begin.

“Hey, Bucky?” he says at Bucky punches his card, hands it directly to Steve instead of throwing it on the desk, and turns to go into the yard.  Bucky looks back at him, and Steve gulps.  “Uh, some men were talking about you the other day?” 

“Did I steal someone’s girl again?” Bucky asks with a grin, referring to not one but two separate incidents where an irate boyfriend had stormed into Bucky’s workplace with the intention of rearranging his perfect face. 

“Uh, no.  They were talking about seeing you by Two Spoons,” he says before realizing that he should never acknowledge he knows the name of the club in question.  He’s never been in it; that takes a level of boldness that Steve’s still working his way up to.    

Bucky flushes and looks furious at Steve’s quiet comment.  Steve does a double check to make sure that they actually are alone in the office this time. 

“Who said that?” he snaps.  Steve doesn’t like the anger directed at him and he wonders if he should have just kept mum. 

“Jack and Connor and Alec,” he stutters. 

“Who saw me there?” Bucky snaps again.  Steve’s eyes widen this time. 

“Uh, Connor’s cousin, I think.  Just wanted to warn you…” he trails off as Bucky storms out of the office. 

Steve’s mind is a whirlwind as he shuffles through his end-of-shift duties.  Did Bucky…

Was he saying…

Was that a confirmation? 

‘Who saw me there?’ is quite different from ‘Who said they saw me there?’  Is he remembering what Bucky said wrong?  He’s probably remembering it differently, or interpreting it incorrectly, because if Bucky does…did like men, then things would be different.  Maybe even…

“Shut up,” he tells himself out loud.  “That’s obviously not true, shut up.”  He berates himself for being so stupid all the way home, and then spends the rest of his evening watching his neighbor’s baby and yo-yoing his hopes up and down.

“Hey,” Bucky tells him the next time they’re alone in the office.  It’s more than a week since the last time they talked.  “Did you say anything to anybody?”  Steve gapes at him for a moment, unable to read Bucky’s mood or even figure out what he’s talking about for a second. 

“No!” Steve blurts.  “Of course not.  It’s just a rumor.  I just wanted to warn you.”  Bucky eyes him up and then relaxes slightly. 

“Okay.  I talked to those guys and threatened to pummel ‘em for spreading rumors.  I didn’t know if I’d have to do the same to you.” 

“Uh, no, please don’t do that,” Steve says with a nervous laugh.  “Of course I’d never spread that to anyone.  I know how it is-”  He stops himself before he gets himself in more trouble.  He has no idea what he’d been about to say, and no idea what it is about the soft blue of Bucky’s eyes that had drawn the partial confession from him in the first place.  “There’s a new boat on the southside,” he says idiotically.  This is only his sixth real conversation with Bucky, and he’s pretty sure there won’t be another. 

Bucky eyes him quizzically, and then he drags his eyes down and up Steve’s form, hunched over the desk though it is.  By the time he returns his eyes to Steve’s, which are roughly the size of dinner plates, Steve is tingling all over with the awareness of being looked at.  He nods and heads for the door, running his fingers through his hair as he disappears into the winter-dark night.   

Steve’s hands shake as he shuffles Bucky’s card back into the pile.  He’s not much for cursing, but oh lord, oh lord, oh lord.  This isn’t him being overly optimistic; he’s positive that Bucky had looked him over.  Jesus Christ, Bucky had checked him out. 

But.

Is Steve supposed to do something with this information?  Is it his turn now?  Is Bucky starting something with him?  Was it just a casual look-over without intentions behind it? 

Unbelievably, the confirmation that Bucky somehow shares Steve’s perversion doesn’t soothe any of his internal conflict; it exacerbates it.  Because now that there’s actually a _chance_ , he internally screams at himself, what is he supposed to _do?_

When he gets home, he stands in front of the cracked mirror behind his door and tries to look at himself the way Bucky had looked at him.  He doesn’t come up with any answers, and if anything, it magnifies his doubts.

There’s nothing intriguing or attractive looking at him in the mirror.  If Bucky had really checked him out, Steve doesn’t think that Bucky was all that impressed by what he saw. 

He flushes with embarrassment over his own body.  He’s long accepted the fact that the growth spurt will never happen and he’s always going to wheeze and hunch.  Accepting it doesn’t stop him from being crushed that he _might_ have actually had a chance for a second in the office.

But if Bucky’s looked, actually looked at him, then he’s positive that he’s been found wanting. 

In a frenzy, he drops to the ground and attempts more than five push-ups.  He can do seven; it’s not really a victory.  He goes to the butcher’s and buys some meat that he’ll have to store in Mrs. O’Ryan’s ice box, and he makes himself a mash of sausage and green beans for dinner.  Meat is supposed to make him stronger, correct?

He looks around his room for things to lift, and, feeling foolish, tries to lift the table.  He can only lever it up by placing one side against his stomach, and he knows that he’s making a racket, so he stops. 

That’s it.  That’s all that Steve knows how to do to improve his physique, and even though he really knew so along along, he come to the resignation that it’s just not going to happen.  This is how he looks; women don’t want him, men don’t want him, this is how the world balances out.  In exchange for his God-given drawing talents, he’s shortchanged an appearance that anyone could actually fall in love with.  It’s been worth it so far, but now that he’s almost positive Bucky is a viable option, it’s overwhelming in its unfairness. 

Bucky doesn’t talk to him again.  He takes his time clocking in, standing near the desk and seemingly waiting for the other men to drift away before punching his card.  Steve struggles to control his face into a casual, bored look whenever Bucky’s around, but it’s for the benefit of the other workers; Bucky usually just stares at Steve’s hands as they shuffle papers or make tally marks with a pencil stub.

Sometimes he hears Bucky muttering as he walks toward the docks, rubbing the back of his neck or fingering the warm, brown strands of his hair as he gives Steve his back.  Steve can’t catch the words, and they’re obviously not intended for him, but he hears Bucky calling himself an idiot and giving himself a hard time more than once.  He wishes that he knew what was wrong in Bucky’s home life or even possibly his romantic life so that he could offer a few words of comfort.

“Whatever’s bothering you will be okay,” he tells Bucky as he clocks in one night, hoping that he’s not insulting him by picking up on this.  Bucky does meet his eyes then, surprised, but says nothing as he holds out his punch card to Steve.  Steve takes it and tugs, but it’s more than a few seconds before Bucky releases it and quickly turns toward the yard.

Steve understands, and goes about his job at the docks with his usual awareness of Bucky, but he’s okay with things returning to normal between them.  He barely knows the guy.  There’s no reason for them to interact.

   

On the morning of December 7th, he’s stuffing wages into envelopes when the boss comes into the office. 

“Why isn’t the radio on?” he snaps, like Steve’s a lazy worker for concentrating on his job without music and chatter in the background.  Steve watches him rush to the radio and snap it on, and he hears the words that will change his world: “Pearl Harbor.” 

More men come into the office, and Steve puts the money away, and everyone just sits and listens.  It’s hard to believe that this is happening – this, what his father’s generation was supposed to have done and forever eliminated from repeatability: A World War. 

Around noon, the radio tells them that enlistment offices are opening and ready for volunteers, and roughly a third of the men leave the docks directly.  Steve scrambles to punch their cards when many of them don’t even bother clocking out. 

When the night shift starts to come in, more than half of the men have already quit and walked off to join the Army.  Steve isn’t going to leave his boss in the lurch, but he knows exactly what he’s doing on his next day off.  Steve has dozens of reasons to enlist, his father and his personal sense of patriotism being heavy contributors, but he’s slightly ashamed of the fact that the first reason he thinks of is Bucky.  He’ll join the Army, bulk up a little, and get a handsome uniform.  It will be great.  Bucky won’t walk away the next time he has cause to give Steve the look-over. 

Bucky comes into the office with two other men chattering about how the enlistment offices had been too full.  Many night shift employees don’t even appear to be coming in, but the smart ones have realized that Army pay doesn’t start when they sign the papers. 

Bucky looks at Steve curiously as he picks up his punch card, and Steve wishes he had the uniform already. 

“What about you?  Are you going to be a little toy soldier, too?”  There’s something mean and verging on panic in the way he says it, and Steve’s fantasy withers a little.

“Yes,” he says with his chest puffed out.  “What about you?”  Bucky’s eyes meet his as the punch machine bites at his card. 

“I probably will, but I’ll wait for all this to settle.  Find out where I’m going and who I’m fighting and if we even have enough damn guns for all the boys.”  Instead of handing his card to Steve, like he’s come to expect, Bucky flicks the card onto the desk forcefully.  It slides across the other cards and papers piled there and flutters to the ground.  Shocked at the unprecedented behavior, he stares at it for a minute before picking it up and noticing that Bucky is gone.

Steve thinks that’s the end of that until Bucky comes back in nearly an hour later. 

“Don’t enlist, Steve,” he tells him almost sadly.  It’s maddeningly unlike his earlier mood; Steve can’t keep up.  “They’ll eat you alive.” 

“I have to,” Steve tells him dumbly.  “My father-”

“Everybody’s father fought in the big one.  You’re too little,” he says kindly.  “You’ll get yourself killed and it won’t help nobody.” 

Bucky has never showed this much interest in Steve, nor spoke to him this sweetly, but Steve is full of rage that Bucky is again underestimating him.  Counting him out because of his body. 

“I don’t have to take advice from you, Barnes,” he says coldly, and Bucky looks sad again before he leaves the office and heads back to his shift. 

He’s never been mad at Bucky before, never had any reason to be, but it jars queasily with his desire to impress Bucky.  He still goes to the enlistment office a few days later, though his feelings are mixed and his heart is heavy. 

“Rogers, Steven,” an examiner calls out, and Steve steps forward in his briefs.  The man actually cackles as he runs his eyes over Steve’s bony chest. 

“I’d think you were a dame if you had tits.”  Steve raises an eyebrow, not impressed with the man’s sense of professionalism. 

“I need to toughen up a little.  I’m willing to fight for the chance,” he says gruffly.  The examiner shakes his head, still smiling. 

“Sorry, buddy.  You don’t look strong enough to carry the gear.”  He flips Steve’s chart open and his eyes widen.  “Wow, kid.  Seriously, the Army will kill you.  Eat some spinach or something, because this isn’t the place for you.”  He stamps Steve’s file with what might as well be a giant “X.” 

Because Steve is a stubborn little cuss, he tries again.  And again.  Finn gives him tips for falsifying information, and Steve treks all over the city, spurred by stubborn determination.  It’s about more than Bucky now; it’s about Steve proving himself to all of these medical doctors who can read Steve’s chart but can’t read his perseverance. 

He hears around the docks a few months later that Bucky’s been drafted, and sure enough, he stops reporting to work.  Something like panic rises in Steve’s gut when he realizes he’s never thought seriously about Bucky dying in the war, and isn’t that ironic, that he’d been so concerned about Bucky carrying crates in the dark but hadn’t spared a thought for what might happen if Bucky did what so many other young men are doing. 

The panic drives him to his sixth enlistment office, desperate that he can’t stay stateside if Bucky’s shipping out.  He’s sitting on the examining table and unbuttoning his shirt when an MP walks into the examining area and stands at attention.  A man in a nice suit follows a minute later. 

“Steven Rogers?” he asks.  And Steve’s spent too much time around people who mistrust men in nice suits, because he answers, “Who’s asking?” 

“Come with me, please.”  The man takes him to an office and pushes the door almost-shut behind Steve, leaving a gap of about an inch.  “Please, take a seat.” 

Steve sits awkwardly on the hard chair across from the bare desk, and the man sits opposite him. 

“You are Steve Rogers, correct?  Of, well, that I really can’t say.  I have five Enlistment Forms with five different addresses on them.”  Steve is so busted.  He knows that what he’s been doing is illegal, and he’s about to get in a heap of trouble for it.  He wonders if he can actually go to jail for this, and then he wonders why he hadn’t looked up the penalties before. 

“I’m sorry,” his natural sense of politeness kicks in.  The man squints suspiciously at him; Steve _had_ back-talked him just a minute ago. 

“Can you explain the discrepancies among your forms?” 

“I just…wanted to get in,” he says after thinking and coming up with nothing. 

“But you were rejected.  Repeatedly.  Why were you rejected, Steven?”  Steve laughs humorlessly and gestures at himself. 

“Look at me!  No one’s been giving me a chance.”

“And just why is a chance so important that you’re risking jail time to get it?”  It is jail; oh lord. 

“I just…want to do my part,” he finally mumbles, thinking that all of his reasons are too cliché or too perverse to impress the man.  It’s possible that even he’s lost sight of his reasoning in the face of his own obstinacy. 

The door swings open at that moment, and a man in glasses and a tweed suit pokes his head in. 

“I vould very much like to speak to Mr. Rogers,” he says in a heavy German accent, and Steve wonders if he had overheard the conversation.  Then he wonders if the door was left open on purpose. 

Something fishy is going on, and Steve isn’t sure what it is.  No one is arresting him for his falsified data; instead, the first man is getting up and leaving, and the German is propping himself up against the desk in front of Steve.  The door clicks, and Steve wonders what he’s gotten himself into. 

“So you vant to kill some Nazis…” 

An hour later, Steve’s head is spinning.  He’s in.  He has a “1A” stamp on his completely accurate file, and he’s shipping out next week.  Erskine, the German, had spoken of a chance to be part of an experiment, and when Steve had admitted that his physique might not be the best for experiments, Erskine had told him that, in fact, it was perfect, but was Steve overly attached to it? 

Steve walks home through darkened streets, feeling a lightness that’s avoided him since the start of the war.  He sees a familiar figure ahead of him when he reaches his own neighborhood, and a second later, he sees Bucky’s face come into view. 

Steve’s mouth goes dry.  Bucky is wearing his uniform, hat and all, and it’s the sexiest thing Steve has ever seen.  It does something to his body right there, in the street, and he blushes and looks at the ground, trying to pass Bucky, invisible. 

“Steve!” Bucky exclaims.  He reaches for Steve and stumbles slightly, and Steve knows that he’s drunk.  “Steve, lemme buy you a drink, please, I have to buy you a drink.”  He’s laughing and his eyes are playful as he grabs Steve’s jacket and pulls him, intoxicated though he is, towards the nearest bar.  As it happens, they’re relatively close to one, though Steve doesn’t frequent bars and he only knows it by the sign. 

“Hey, Bucky,” he says haltingly as he allows himself to be pulled toward the bar’s door.  He’s still in shock over how good Bucky looks and how much he wants. 

“Come have a drink with me!” Bucky practically shouts. 

“I hear you’re buying,” Steve tells him, cockier than he actually feels.  Bucky is delighted with the remark, and he turns around so that he can fling an arm around Steve. 

It’s warm under Bucky’s arm, and it smells like cologne and sweat.  Steve’s never touched Bucky before; he thinks his heart might beat right out of his chest.

“Sit, sit.  What’re you having?” Bucky asks him when he’s steered them inside the bar and shoved Steve into a barstool.  He hops up on his own stool, somehow graceful even when he’s sloshed, and Steve wonders what the timeline of Bucky’s night has looked like. 

“Did you just come from here?”  Bucky laughs again as he waves down the bartender.

“No, I came from Louie’s!  Got kicked out,” he adds, looking ashamed. 

“Why’s that, Bucky?” Steve asks with a grin that hopefully just looks teasing.  Steve worries that there might be some hunger in his gaze, if anyone looks too closely. 

“Hit on too many dames with fellas.  Two whiskeys, neat,” Bucky orders.  Steve is fairly confident that he can’t drink whiskey without looking like a pansy, but maybe Bucky is too drunk to notice. 

“So you struck out at Louie’s,” he says smugly.  He doesn’t have any close male friends, but this seems to be how they talk to one another.  Steve hears it at the docks. 

“Yes!  The night before I ship out with the 107th, and no dame wants to dance with me!” Bucky pouts.  Steve laughs as his insides freeze.  Bucky ships out tomorrow.  This might be the last time he ever sees him. 

The whiskeys arrive, and Bucky clinks his glass against Steve’s. 

“But it’s okay, because now you’re here.”  He drinks and Steve pretends to do the same, putting the glass against his lips and feeling the burn without even opening his mouth.  He doesn’t know what Bucky means by that remark.  God, now he has to interpret everything Bucky says through an alcohol filter as well. 

“I am here,” he says, and then he tries the whiskey, just a little sip.  Predictably, he chokes. 

“You okay?” Bucky asks him with worried eyes. 

“Yeah.  Yeah,” Steve waves at him, his own eyes watering.  He hands his glass to Bucky.  “I can’t drink this though.  You have it.” 

“What do you want?” Bucky says, crestfallen.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t ask you what you wanted.”  He did, actually, he’d just never waited for the answer. 

“I don’t really like the taste of alcohol.”  Bucky puts his lips to Steve’s glass and throws back the whiskey, and it makes Steve’s face heat even more when he thinks that Bucky’s lips touched the part of the glass where his own had rested moments ago. 

“I got you,” Bucky says with a wink.  He calls the bartender over again, and Steve doesn’t hear what he orders, but it comes a moment later and it’s red. 

“What in the world,” he murmurs as he sniffs it.  It smells like cherries. 

“Drink!” Bucky urges with his hand on Steve’s knee.  With that motivation, Steve takes a deep breath and gulps his drink down.  It’s good, and Steve can barely taste the alcohol.  Bucky isn’t satisfied until Steve finishes it and tells him as much. 

“Good!  I can tell everyone that on my last night in Brooklyn, I didn’t get laid but I bought Steve Rogers a drink.”  It’s nonsense again, and Steve smiles the way he might at a rambling child.  He notices that Bucky’s hand is still squeezing his knee.

“You sure did, Bucky.  Hey, I have some news for you myself.”  He pats his coat where his papers are safely concealed.  “I finally got my enlistment approved.” 

The dopey smile slides off Bucky’s face. 

“How?” he asks bluntly.  Steve’s embarrassed and angry again in the blink of an eye. 

“Maybe because not everyone thinks I’m worthless just because I’m small,” he fires back.  Bucky looks at him incredulously. 

“You’re not worthless, Steve, you’re just…too delicate,” he says awkwardly.  Steve rolls his eyes.

“I can hold my own in boot camp,” he says, which might be a lie for all he knows.  He’s damn sure going to try.  But if he has to run more than a block, it’s going to be a little difficult. 

“I can’t fucking believe this.  Who let you in?” Bucky says angrily, finally taking his hand back.  Missing its warmth and weight, Steve gets to his feet.  He’s in love with Bucky, but he can’t handle sitting here and being told how weak and worthless he is.  It’s time to go. 

“No, Steve, wait,” Bucky says as Steve heads for the door.  He tries to follow, but has to square things away with the bartender first.  Steve is almost ready to turn to corner to his street when Bucky catches up to him. 

“Steve, no, Steve don’t be mad at me,” Bucky drunkenly pleads.  He truly does look distraught, so Steve stops walking and claps a hand on his shoulder.  It’s firm underneath the stiff Army jacket. 

“Good luck, Bucky.  I hope our paths cross again.”  It’s such a meaningless thing to say to someone who’s lived on your block your entire life, but with whom you’ve only had, now, seven real conversations.  Bucky nods anyway. 

“Me too, Steve.”  Something flickers in his face, and Steve thinks for a few seconds that he’s about to be kissed.  In public.  Under a street lamp.  Somehow, he’s willing to risk it, until the voice in the back of his head reminds him that it would be a pity kiss. 

Bucky doesn’t actually want him, he reminds himself.  Bucky is feeling like men feel when they’re about to ship out, and they need a solid connection the night before they go to make them feel like they’ve said ‘goodbye’ to everything they’ve ever known.  Bucky got turned down by girls, and now Steve’s the closest person at hand, and he’s narrowing in on Steve.  But he doesn’t actually want Steve. 

“Bye, Bucky,” he says somewhat pathetically, pride and longing fighting for dominance in his voice.  He’s going to hate himself for walking away from this later, he knows, but he’ll hate himself more if he doesn’t.

“Please don’t do it, Steve,” Bucky practically pleads with him as Steve steps back.  “Please just stay here, be safe, you don’t need to go.”  He moves to run his fingers through his hair and nearly knocks off his hat. 

“Okay, fine.  I’ll be here,” Steve lies to set Bucky’s mind at ease.  He can at least do him that kindness the night before he ships out, even if it won’t matter when Bucky sobers up and forgets even seeing Steve. 

“Yeah?” Bucky demands.  He fixes his hat, but it’s still cocked too far to the side.   

“Yeah.  Go get some rest.” 

He walks towards his own building and hopes that Bucky makes it less than twenty yards to his own front door.  He permits himself one glace as he shoulders his way into his building.  Bucky is standing where Steve left him, his face too far away for Steve to read the expression there. 

Before he goes to bed, he climbs onto the fire escape to check, and Bucky is nowhere in sight.  He sees the streetlamp where he was maybe almost kissed by the most handsome man in Brooklyn, and feels a flash of relief that he’s leaving soon.  Without his parents, without any close friends (because who bothered getting close to a man who found himself on his deathbed at least once every winter?), without Bucky to notice from afar, he’s just one more orphaned son of immigrants rattling around a big city without anything to tie him there besides blind affection for the city itself.   

 

Ten days later finds Steve in boot camp, and as he suspected, he’s at the bottom of the class.  He can barely run, he can barely do push-ups, and he just wasn’t ever meant to climb things.  The other recruits laugh at him, and he sees people with clipboards watching him and scribbling things down.

After a week, though, Steve can wheeze his way through an entire mile.  He can do twenty sore push-ups.  And he can climb and crawl.  Sort of.  His chest burns with pride at himself; so he’s behind the other men in terms of physical ability, but clearly, he can make progress.  Maybe, he can catch up. 

After Steve throws himself on a dummy grenade, Erskine pulls him aside. 

“Steven, remember what I said about being attached to your physique?” he asks.  Steve does, but he doesn’t understand what it means.  “I’m choosing you for my experiment, Steven.  If I have your permission.”

“Uh, what’ll it do?” Steve asks. 

“Hmm, well, you zee Hodge?” Erskine asks, pointing.  Steve nods.  “Would you like to be able to outrun Hodge?” 

Steve blinks. 

“Uh, yeah.  Don’t think that’s ever going to happen, though.”  Erskine smiles smugly. 

“We’ll zee.  Is this your ‘yes?’”  Steve is still confused, but he thinks about being able to outrun the fastest man in basic training, and he wonders if Bucky would think him weak then. 

“Yes, sir,” Steve says.  He hopes he won’t regret this. 

Steve is taken back to Brooklyn, of all places, and injected with a shot of penicillin that makes his eyes water.  He’s not sure that he’s going to be able to do this after all, but everyone looks so hopeful, and he’s never been able to let people down. 

Part of the process involves something called Vita-Rays, and part of it involves a machine that looks like a science fiction coffin.  There are also more needles than Steve really believes are necessary. 

The procedure goes smoothly enough for everyone outside the Sci-fi coffin, and as Steve writhes inside it, he feels the oddest sensation of his muscles ripping and knitting themselves back together, his bones stretching, and his organs adjusting their placement.  His whole body feels sweaty, and he looks down at his chest to see it expanding. 

He experiences a moment of disorientation; there’s no way that’s _his_ chest.  There must be a weird mirror effect in this coffin.  But then the coffin opens, and Steve holds his hands up in front of his face, and they’re attached to strong forearms, which are attached to rippling biceps, which are attached to broad shoulders and a chest with miles of smooth skin and sinewy muscle.

He gasps, and he imagines Bucky’s reaction. 

There’s no time to really dwell on it though; a Hydra spy is in the facility, and he shoots the only man who ever really believed in Steve’s strength before running out of the facility and showering gunfire on any who would follow.  Peggy, a sassy brunette agent whom Steve had perfunctorily attempted to flirt with in the car, shoots at the man, and with just a thought, Steve finds himself running far faster than Hodge ever could.

He pulls the man out of a submarine and watches him commit suicide by cyanide before things finally calm down and Steve has another moment to stare at his new body.  It doesn’t feel like him – it has none of his scars or birthmarks – but he decides that he likes it.  It’s powerful.  It’s attractive.  And it’s, apparently, the only one the US Government will ever produce. 

Forced to choose between being a lab rat or a bond salesman, Steve picks bonds, and he travels the country with Senator Brandt and a crew of chorus girls.  For the most part, it’s good.  People cheer for him, women (and a few men) throw themselves at him, and he’s seen the data and he knows he’s helping the war effort.  He feels like a painted clown entertaining crowds, but he’s helping the war effort.  When he tells the giddy audiences that their money will put bullets into the barrels of their best guys’ guns, it’s Bucky that he pictures in his head. 

He never takes any of his admirers up on their offers of personal appreciation, and he tells himself that it’s because he can’t risk getting caught, but it’s still somehow about Bucky.  He hasn’t seen the guy in a year, and he owes Bucky nothing, but somehow, it feels like being unfaithful to him.  It’s stupid, but it’s true.  When the war effort feels far away, and he questions why he agreed to this in the first place, he still comes up with Bucky’s face.   

Steve finally gets to go overseas for a USO tour, and he’s thrilled to be among actual soldiers.  Actual soldiers, as it turns out, hate the idea of Captain America and his Hollywood-fake mythos.  They’re mostly in agreement that Captain America is a pussy pretty boy who’s never been in combat, and Steve knows that they’re right. 

Peggy comes to see him after a disaster of a show one night.  He’s glad to see her, and he thinks that he’d have fallen in love with her if not for, well, being queer.  But with the chips as they are, she reminds him of another saucy brunette, and he likes being around her.  She tries to cheer him out of the funk he’s fallen into over the soldiers’ jeers, and in the process, she tells him that Bucky’s unit has been captured. 

Colonel Phillips confirms that Bucky’s a prisoner of war, and Steve’s heart aches for his loud, flirty Brooklyn boy, stuck behind enemy lines without hope of rescue from his costs-and-benefits military. 

Steve can’t think straight as he throws together his belongings and grabs whatever weapons and combat gear he can get his hands on.  Peggy shouts at him and finally offers to help, and Steve finds himself parachuting just outside of a Hydra camp before he can really take stock of the situation. 

His head clears as he sneaks inside the camp, all the stupid bravado draining from him, but he’s still confident in his body’s ability to cause some series damage to these Nazi bastards.  He’s untested, though, so he doesn’t know how much he can do.  Take out a few Nazis in revenge for what they’ve done to Bucky and his men?  Take out a platoon of Nazis in revenge?  Get inside the compound?  Free American soldiers?  Get to Bucky?  He doesn’t know the limits of what he can do as Captain America, but this seems like an excellent opportunity to really test Erskine’s invention. 

As it turns out, he can hurt a lot of Nazis.  He can get into the compound.  And he can free American soldiers, who run to take their own revenge on the Nazis.  But he can’t find Bucky, and his breathing speeds up like he’s got his old lungs again. 

He needs to find Bucky.  He’s not leaving without Bucky.  Even if it’s his body that Steve has to carry back to the American camp, he’s going to do this. 

A soldier point him towards a series of scary, twisted lab-like rooms, and Steve jogs through them, seeing evidence of recent use.  But there are no Americans to be found. 

Steve is about to turn back and search the cages again when he hears someone mumbling from a door in his peripherals. 

“32557,” the voice mumbles. 

Steve doesn’t recognize the number, but he’s paid way too much attention to Bucky since he was eleven.  He can recognize his voice, unseen, because he’s been practicing for years. 

He rushes in to see Bucky strapped to a table, eyes glassy and faraway, mumbling his name and what must be his serial number over and over again. 

“Bucky,” he whispers as his fingers fly over the fastenings of Bucky’s bonds.  Bucky struggles to focus on him.  “Oh my god.  Come on, Bucky.  Come back.” 

“Wh-who are you?” he wheezes as Steve helps him sit up.  There’s no time to explain what is quite a long and detailed story, so Steve helps him to his feet and pulls him away from the table.  Bucky is reluctant, distrustful. 

“I’m Captain America.  I was sent by the allied forces to get you guys from the 107th out,” Steve tells him, aware that Bucky will be more inclined to go with him if he can prove that they’re on the same side.  He makes sure that Bucky can see the flag on his chest above the zipper of his jacket, and Bucky’s eyes lock on the star. 

“Captain America?” he says to himself. 

“Stars, stripes, and death-defying heroism, at your service,” Steve jokes, and Bucky lets him pull an arm over Steve’s shoulders and set off as quickly as Bucky can manage for the door. 

“Who’r you here with?” Bucky asks him as they hurry out of the compound. 

“Your guys,” Steve says in reference to the shooting outside.  Bucky looks at him in awe. 

“You came here by yourself?” 

“One man job.  If you’ve got the right man.”  Steve is practically preening under Bucky’s attention and can’t help flirting a little.  The flirtation is derailed by a Hydra officer ripping his face off and a catwalk falling into the lower level of the facility, which happen to be on fire, so it takes about an hour before Steve’s tested his body with a dangerous long-jump, half-carried Bucky out of the facility, regrouped with the other members of the 107th, and started walking back to American-held territory and their camp. 

The soldiers can’t stop staring at Steve.  He’s not really a Captain, but it’s probably not a good time to say that when so many men are placing their trust in Steve and telling him how glad they are that he came for them.  He feels the weight of their trust as they defer to him in all decisions, and when he decides to start the trek back to camp that night, in order to get quicker medical attention for the wounded soldiers, they all immediately get into a rough formation. 

Behind Steve. 

He awkwardly leads them in what he’s almost positive is the right direction, and he can’t help but notice that Bucky is never more than two feet from him at all times. 

Bucky looks like hell warmed over.  He’ll always be devastatingly handsome Steve’s eyes, but even Steve can admit that he’s covered in dirt and shit and blood, and there’s no way to fool himself into pretending that this is just dirty Bucky after a day at the docks.  He’s also clearly hurt, but, because he’s compelled to be next to Steve, he won’t go ride on the transports and tanks Steve had suggested they steal for the trek. 

Every once in a while as they walk, subdued, back to camp, Steve will glance over and Bucky will be looking at him with the same awed look on his face.  Steve hopes that Bucky will focus enough soon to recognize him, but then they stop for a rest and Bucky slips into Sergeant role and starts giving orders about making camp, and Steve realizes that Bucky is lucid again. 

Bucky is lucid, and he doesn’t seem to recognize Steve.  Steve knows he looks a little different now, but his face is mostly the same.  His voice is mostly the same.  His mannerisms are mostly the same, except for the fact that the Steve Rogers Bucky knew would never have been capable of storming a Hydra base even with all the backup in the world. 

Steve motions Bucky over after most of the soldiers have had some water from a stream and they’ve sorted out what provisions they have.  Bucky comes and smiles at him eagerly.  Steve notices absently that he’s tried to clean himself up in the stream, but there’s still dirt caked into his wet hair. 

Seeing Bucky with wet hair reminds Steve of the days when it would pour back home, and the men’s shirts would stick to their skin, defining every pot belly and flat stomach.  Bucky’s wet shirt would cling to every muscle, and Steve would sit inside the dry office and draw it on the back of receipts.    

“Do you know who I am?” Steve asks him, his voice raspier than he means it to be.  Bucky nods.  Steve doesn’t believe him.  “Who am I?”

“You’re the guy who saved me and my boys from a really fucked up death,” Bucky says honestly.  “You’re maybe a god.  I saw that jump.  You’re beyond human.”  He’s almost breathless, and he chuckles at himself.  “I’m sorry, man.  You probably have people fawning over you all the time, I’m just like them, huh.”  He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, and Steve recognizes the gesture from the old office by the docks.  It seems like a lifetime ago that they’d had their ritual of handing the punch card over and handing it back without making eye contact because Steve was embarrassed and Bucky was obviously thinking about other things. 

“No, you’re not just like them,” he tells Bucky earnestly.  He doesn’t get a chance to clarify, because Bucky looks at him with heat in his eyes.  Then he drops his gaze down, and brings it back up. 

Steve’s mouth goes dry.  He knows he was hoping for this if he ever got the chance to show Bucky his new physique, but it’s happening awfully fast.  There’s still over a hundred men relying on Steve to get them back to base. 

“Um, we should get back to the men.”  Bucky’s expression shuts down with humiliation, and Steve races to remedy whatever error of rejection he’s just made.  He really isn’t good at being wanted.  “It’s-later, okay.  Not no, just…later.” 

Bucky’s stoic expression cracks into fondness every time Steve turns to look at him as he follows Steve back to the main group of men, and he continues to hover in Steve’s shadow.  Steve likes having Bucky on his left, so he doesn’t say anything, and by the time they get back to camp, Bucky is the de facto second-in-command by virtue of that fact alone.  

 

Steve reports for punishment.  He’s made an actual Captain. 

“I’m sorry, do you not want a promotion?” Colonel Phillips asks him dryly when Steve gapes at him. 

“Is this how it works?” he asks, confused.  He remembers the ranking system from basic just fine. 

“Hell no, but this is war.  Over a hundred men waltz into my camp with stars in their eyes over you, you think I’m going to break their hearts and tell them you’re a movie star who plays a Captain?  Hell no.  Besides,” Phillips tells him, sounding pained to say it.  “You proved yourself out there.  You can, believe it or not, actually lead men.  So it’s not just about morale.” 

“Thank you, sir,” Steve says, because there doesn’t appear to be anything else to say in this situation. 

Bucky’s waiting for him when he gets out of the Colonel’s tent. 

“Captain!” he calls.  Steve turns and smiles.  He’s wearing a clean uniform, and he’s not holed up in the med tent.  Steve is on board with both of these developments. 

“You can call me Steve when we’re alone,” he teases Bucky.  Bucky beams at him, and Steve feels like he’s already won the war.  “How are the men doing?”

“They love their Captain,” Bucky teases him back.  “Some of the guys here tried to say Captain America was a hack.  I think Dum-Dum set ‘em straight.”  Steve laughs awkwardly, hoping that Bucky never finds out about the bonds and the USO. 

“How long have you been here, Cap?” Bucky asks. 

“Just a few weeks.  I was sent here by brass for this mission,” he fibs, because he’s not copping to the real reason he came to Europe. 

“Where were you before?”

“Stateside, tracking down some Hydra spies there.”  One Hydra spy, to be precise. 

“Wow,” Bucky says, laughing and shaking his head again.  “I didn’t know about you when I was still at home.  Did you just get activated for this war, or have you been keepin’ us safe for a while now?” 

It hits him like a punch.

Bucky still hasn’t figured out who Steve is. 

Steve realizes that they got off-track when they were talking back on the trek, and apparently, even knowing Steve’s name isn’t enough to jog Bucky’s memory. 

It hurts more than the gunshot he’d taken back at the Hydra camp.  Bucky has his name, he has his face, and he _still_ doesn’t know who Steve is.  He tastes something bitter at the back of his throat. 

Well, what is he supposed to expect?  They had seven damn conversations, one of them while Bucky was completely drunk.  Bucky barely knew who he was.  Steve built this thing up in his head like he was going to sweep in and blow Bucky’s mind with his new physique, and Bucky _is_ impressed, but he thinks he’s looking at someone else. 

Because, Steve forces himself through the thought, Bucky doesn’t give a damn about Steve Rogers.  Steve Rogers is yet another paddy neighbor, one of hundreds, with whom Bucky had occasional, brief interactions in the course of a long and social life. 

Still tasting the bitter thing, Steve suddenly doesn’t care if Bucky knows who he is.  He’s getting what he wanted; Bucky sees him, wants him, and he’s able to show off like he’s always wanted to.  Telling Bucky that he’s lusted after him for ten years isn’t going to help him here; if anything, it’s probably going to creep Bucky out. 

So he makes a decision.  It hurts a little bit, but he still feels like he’s winning the grand prize. 

“I’m not really supposed to talk about my pre-war work,” he says with a friendly shrug.  Bucky grins and waggles his eyebrows at Steve.  It’s effortless. 

They talk for hours, mostly about Bucky’s experiences, and Steve asks for his frank assessment of most of the men.  He’s getting an idea for what he wants to do with his new Captaincy, and he needs the fiercest and most stupid-brave men he can find.  Bucky certainly fits the bill. 

“I have to go talk to Colonel Phillips and Agent Carter,” he says finally, acknowledging that he doesn’t know where he’s sleeping or how he fits into camp culture.  This is still new to him, an actual military camp. 

“Sure, Cap,” Bucky tells him.  He lowers his voice.  “You, uh, want me to come by your tent later?”  Steve is fairly sure that he makes an audible noise of surprise once he catches on to Bucky’s meaning.  He doesn’t even know if he has a tent, assumes that he probably does now, but he doesn’t think he’s ready for this. 

“I’ll probably be with the brass until late.  And you need rest; you’re injured more than you’re letting on,” he scolds.  Bucky grins at him, innocently.  Steve’s gotten to learn so much about him today, and he’s seen so many new expressions on Bucky’s face.  It’s overwhelming, too overwhelming to add whatever two queer men can do when they’re alone in a tent on top of it all. 

“Goodnight,” he says softly, making sure that voice is pitched so just Bucky can hear the longing.  He gets another new expression in return – a sweet smile on Bucky’s face that promises more sinful things later. 

Over the next few days, Steve learns how to be a US Army Captain.  Most of the soldiers call him Captain America, but he’s officially Captain Robinson on paper.  He’s a little startled to find the new name on his dog tags, but Peggy winks and shrugs as she slips them over his neck. 

“For lack of knowing what else to do with you, your identity is classified, for now,” she tells him crisply.  He stares dumbly at the metal tags, proclaiming louder than his new body can that the old, weak Steve is gone.  Dead, back in Brooklyn. 

“Classified means don’t tell anyone,” Peggy tells him after a minute as he continues to stare at the tags.  There’s a hint of sarcasm in her voice, but her eyes meet his and he can read concern there. 

“I’m not a galoot; I know what it means,” he responds with an eye roll, tucking the tags under his uniform.  She holds out her hand, and a second later, he fishes the old tags off his neck and places them in her palm with a slight chink of metal against metal.

Something possesses him to let his new Captain’s tags dangle outside his shirt as he drinks with the Commandos that night, matching Dugan drink-for-drink and enjoying his frustration when Steve doesn’t turn a single sheet to the wind. 

Bucky sits directly next to him, staking out his place as Steve’s second once again.  Steve can feel Bucky’s attention catch on the tags several times, but it takes two beers before Bucky reaches out and plucks one of the tags between his thumb and index finger.

“Let’s see if Cap is a good Catholic boy,” he jokes weakly and rather incongruously against the topic, which is radio programs from back home. 

“Bucky, don’t touch your Captain without his permission,” Jones scolds with a laugh.  Steve waves a hand at him, signaling that he doesn’t care, but Bucky is staring at the metal in his hand.  A second later, he blinks and looks up, smiling widely at the table. 

“Captain Steven Robinson, 987654320, blood type O, Catholic, no next of kin.”  Steve swallows as Bucky meets his eyes. 

“Do they leave the next of kin off because of you being, well, you?” Monty wants to know. 

“I actually don’t have any next of kin,” Steve answers before wondering what is and isn’t classified about Steven Robinson.  He figures that Robinson is just as alone in this world as Rogers is, though, so it probably doesn’t matter. 

“No distant aunts and uncles?” Morita asks, and Dernier tacks on, “No sweetheart?” 

“Everyone’s dead or back in Ireland,” Steve tells them, dodging the sweetheart question.  He turns to the closest thing he has to a sweetheart, and pries the tags out of Bucky’s hands.  He’s gripping them tighter than necessary, and he seems startled when he feels Steve’s fingers against his own. 

“You done there, soldier?” Steve asks in a voice teasing enough that the other Commandos don’t take more than cursory notice.  Bucky releases the tags suddenly, grinning sheepishly. 

“O isn’t that shocking of a blood type, Bucky,” Steve admonishes, still playful so as to avoid attention from the Commandos. 

“Sorry, Cap.  I thought it said something different for a second there.”   

Three more beers in, Bucky’s loose enough to brush his fingers against Steve’s leg, and Steve is suddenly grateful that they’re sleeping in a bombed-out hotel tonight. 

Steve’s only been waiting about fifteen minutes for the hallways to empty and Bucky to spin some excuse to the men he’s sharing with.  Captain Rogers gets his own room, which none of the men questions for a second.  They believe so strongly in Steve’s authority that Steve is sometimes terrified by the weight and responsibility of leading them and not letting them down.  He resolves to be the bravest, fairest leader he can be.  He thinks he’s succeeding so far. 

Bucky quietly knocks on the door before slipping inside, and Steve can’t breathe for a moment with how beautiful Bucky looks in the candlelight.  Steve looks up at him from where he’s sitting on the bed. 

“I just want you to know, that this isn’t my area of expertise,” he tells Bucky with a nervous laugh.  Bucky comes closer and straddles his legs, hovering his prick just inches above Steve’s.  It’s already too much, but Steve’s been wanting this for a long time. 

“It’s okay, Cap,” Bucky says with a grin.  His lips brush against Steve’s, and Steve remembers laughably the time that he’d actually thought Bucky was going to kiss him.  “I mostly know what I’m doing here.  Never been with a bigger guy, though.” 

Bucky presses their lips together more firmly and parts Steve’s lips with his tongue.  It’s warm and beer-tasting, and Steve can’t get drunk, but he thinks he can certainly intoxicate himself on Bucky’s mouth.  Bucky slips his hands over Steve’s shoulders and pushes Steve forward into his chest, and Bucky is firm and warm all over.  He wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist and falls backward onto the bed, their teeth clicking together in the fall. 

It’s funny, because Bucky laughs.  Whatever Bucky likes is good with Steve; he has only a vague idea of what’s about to happen, but he’ll love all of it if Bucky is involved.  Steve sets a hand against Bucky’s jaw to angle his mouth so Steve can lick into more of it.  He runs his tongue over Bucky’s teeth and the palate of Bucky’s mouth, absolutely amazed. 

“Okay, so you like tongue,” Bucky comments.  Is Steve not supposed to like tongue?  Is this too much tongue?  “It’s not bad!” he promises when he sees the confusion in Steve’s face.  He laughs again, and everything is so funny and amusing.  Steve really does feel drunk off of this; his thoughts are slip-sliding around like his brain is moving.

“Let’s see where else you like tongue,” Bucky tells him a minute later.  He sits up, pushing his crotch into Steve’s for a second, and pulls his shirt over his head.  His dog tags smack against his chest.  He has to help Steve take his own shirt off because Steve can’t stop staring at all of the exposed skin and muscles, made sharper by the rations and the physicality of war. 

“You sure know how to flatter a guy, Cap,” Bucky says as he yanks Steve’s pants open but only slides them down a few inches.  Steve lifts his head to see Bucky dip his own head and, mother of God, lick a line up Steve’s prick.

Steve’s heard of this before; he’s from Brooklyn, after all.  But he never thought he’d experience it.  He’s torn between rolling his eyes into the back of his head and enjoying it, and flipping them over so he can do this to Bucky.  God, he wants to make Bucky feel like this. 

His body proves immobile, caught in the spell of Bucky’s mouth, and Steve can only sputter and groan until the tightness in his balls tells him he’s about to spill down Bucky’s throat.  Is he supposed to say something?

“Uh, Bucky,” he says roughly.  Bucky just squeezes his balls and continues to suck noisily and enthusiastically at Steve’s prick.  It’s so much feeling; Steve stuffs the corner of his blankets into his mouth to muffle what would otherwise be a shout as he spills. 

Bucky slips off Steve’s drooping prick, and Steve pulls him up against his body, fumbling between them.  He knows how to jerk off, and that’s about his only contribution to tonight, but he wants to jerk Bucky off and make him spill.  He gets a hand around the thickness of Bucky’s prick and pumps it up and down, twisting his hand a little over the head.  Bucky’s cut where he isn’t, and he wants to just look at it and touch it for hours.  He’s so curious about this most secret part of Bucky, and he wonders how many other men (and how many women) have seen it.  The probable number, knowing Bucky, makes a wave of jealousy break over him, and he speeds up to pull himself out of the funk he doesn’t want. 

“Oh, shit.  Cap…,” Bucky moans quietly, still cautious about the walls and the soldiers dozing around them. 

“Come on, Bucky,” Steve whispers encouragement into his neck.  Hearing his name in Bucky’s pleasure-wrecked voice makes his prick stand at attention again.  Steve has noticed that it barely has a waiting period before it can get hard again now, but he hasn’t really had much reason to test this.  “Come on, Bucky, I want you to feel so good.  Come on, Bucky.”  Bucky keens and Steve feels something hot and slippery coat his hand.  It feels like every time he’s spilled on his own hand, and so much better. 

Steve gets up to get a handkerchief from his gear, and he wipes them both down with a goofy grin. 

“That was…wow,” he confesses boyishly.  Bucky’s eyes narrow in on his prick, hard and leaking again, and he whistles. 

“Jeez, Cap, is this another of your super powers?”  Steve blusters that he doesn’t have powers, but Bucky ignores him and reaches out to touch.  “In that case, Cap, we haven’t even gotten to the main event yet.” 

He grins wickedly.  Steve is a little scared.  What’s the main event?  They’ve used their hands and mouths on each other, and they obviously can’t do it like a man does with a woman. 

“Do you have any Vaseline?” Bucky asks him.  Confused, Steve goes back to his gear and gets the little tin.  Bucky scoops out a dollop and settles on his back.  He pulls his feel flush against his ass, and then spreads his legs, so Steve can get a good look at-

Oh lord.   

Steve knows where this is going.  He’s never contemplated this, never looked at this part of Bucky or any man and thought that he could take them this way.  Now that he knows, it’s like the curtain has been pulled back.  He doesn’t think he’ll be able to look away ever again.

But he has some concerns as well, and as Bucky slides a goopy finger into his own…his own hole, Steve gulps and tries to be a good enough man to voice them. 

“Uh, Bucky, don’t.  Don’t hurt yourself for me.” 

“It won’t hurt, Cap.  I’ve done this before, kinda.”  And that makes jealousy flare up even hotter than before.  Who’s taken Bucky like this?  Someone in Brooklyn?  Someone in the Army?  Someone Steve knows? 

“Are you sure?” Steve asks, doubtful.  He doesn’t know a lot about that part of the body, but he doesn’t think that his prick is going to fit.  That’s probably why the Vaseline is involved. 

“So sure,” Bucky says with another devilish grin, and Steve just needs to kiss him again.  He alternates between watching Bucky open himself up in awe, and kissing Bucky into the bed, and by the time Bucky says he’s “ready,” Steve doesn’t think he’s ever been this hard. 

“Why don’t you lie down,” Bucky suggests.  Steve still can’t quiet envision how this is going to go.  He lies on his back and Bucky shifts a leg over him.  He runs his hands over Steve’s chiseled chest.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing with me, but I’m damn glad you’re doing it,” he admits before sinking onto Steve’s prick. 

Steve’s brain whites out for a while. 

Later, when Bucky has snuck back to his own room and Steve is lying on the mussed, dirtied bed alone, he tries to collect his spinning thoughts. 

He’s not a virgin anymore.

Bucky’s done this before.

This is better than all of his fantasies involving Bucky back home.  If he’d known that this was a possibility…well, he probably wouldn’t have been able to see Bucky without a huge hard-on poking into his buttons. 

He falls asleep thinking about Bucky’s comment.  He’s determined that he doesn’t want Bucky to think he’s into casual sex with his soldiers.  As far as Steve’s concerned, Bucky’s his…well, dame obviously is not the term he wants.  His…fellow.  Steve is actually doing this; he actually has a fellow, and it’s Bucky, and everything is better than he could have imagined.  He’s falling even harder for Bucky now that he’s really getting to know him, and he wonders if Bucky might be falling for him back. 

He doesn’t consider the potential hazards of falling in love in a war.  He refuses to. 

 

Captain America and the Howling Commandos help change the tide of the European conflict.  They storm Hydra bases and blow up weaponry.  They take Hydra officials prisoner.  They get closer and close to Schmidt. 

For the next year, they travel around northern Europe and do their damndest to end the war.  Steve sometimes thinks about what will happen after the war, with him and Bucky.  He wonders if he’ll tell Bucky.  If they’ll go back to Brooklyn together.  Or if Bucky will hate him for lying.  Or if Bucky will even want a fellow stateside.  So he never brings it up.  Bucky doesn’t either. 

 

In Austria, Steve and Bucky sit with their backs against a massive, gnarly tree trunk, and read the latest installment of the Captain America comic. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bucky says as he glares at the depiction of himself as a pubescent teenager.  “Why am I the fuckin’ kid?”

“Because depicting you as Cap’s fellow probably wouldn’t help the war effort too well,” Steve says with a grin.  Bucky scoots closer to him and Steve checks to make sure that no Commandos are within eyesight. 

“You think we’ll get some alone time on this mission?” Bucky asks with heat in his voice.  Steve ignores the stirrings of his prick in response to Bucky’s tone, and flips to the next page to see comic Captain America punch Hitler.  It’s a trademark of comic Captain America, though the real thing hasn’t had the pleasure. 

“We’re alone now,” Steve teases.  Bucky kicks his foot. 

“You know what I mean, moron.”  Steve sweeps the area again, and then quickly drops a light kiss on Bucky’s lips. 

“That’ll have to tide you over.  I don’t think we’re even going to be inside again until we get to Czechoslovakia.”  Bucky groans. 

They finish the comic and head back to the campsite with a few feet between them for appearance’s sake.  Steve’s side still feels warm from Bucky’s heat, and he’s smiling as they come across Dum Dum smoking and playing a game of solitaire on the packed earth. 

“Cap, we gonna get back to the Allied side of things soon?  I got a letter to send,” he asks as Bucky crouches down and tries to mess up his cards.  Dum Dum slaps his hand away.  “Fuck off, Barnes, you nuisance.” 

“Yeah, I got some letters too, Cap,” Bucky says as he succeeds in flicking the draw pile.  Steve absently wonders who Bucky’s writing to and whether he knows them. 

“We should be gone within the week,” he says.  Realistically it’s more like four days, but he knows that tempers will fare much better if he overestimates rather than under. 

That night, Steve curls up in his sleeping back next to Bucky’s, and he sees Bucky’s blue eyes glint at him even though it’s overcast and Steve is buried up to his own eyes in blankets.  Without making a sound, Bucky shifts inside his bag and makes a very low, bitten-off noise.  He opens his mouth with a wet, unseen sound, and Steve hears fabric rustling as Bucky pants. 

Whenever they’ve gone too long without an abandoned house or barn or convenient thick of woods, this is what they do.  One of them jerks off while the other keeps watch, and then they switch roles.  Steve likes that he can see Bucky as he strokes himself with fantasies about Bucky, because it helps to smell him and faintly see him through the dark.  He hopes that Bucky also fantasizes about him, though he doesn’t ask. 

 

They’re keeping watch in a factory in Czechoslovakia while the rest of the Commandos sleep; or rather, Steve is kneeling between Bucky’s legs and sucking on his prick as Bucky’s taught him with multiple demonstrations, while Bucky keeps a look-out over Steve’s body. 

“Your eyes had better be open up there,” Steve mutters as he takes a break and looks up through his eyelashes.  Bucky’s eyes are open, but he’s looking down at Steve, open-mouthed.  “Bucky.  Pay attention.” 

“I’m sorry, it’s hard,” Bucky pouts.  “You’ve never seen you do this.  It’s a fucking vision.” 

Something twitches at Steve’s heart, and he doesn’t know why he’s doing this now, right in the middle of pleasuring Bucky, but he does. 

“Bucky, do you just like me because I look like this?” he asks.  He’s okay with Bucky not knowing their shared history, but he needs what they have now to be real.  If Bucky says yes, it won’t be enough.  Though Steve doesn’t know how he’s supposed to give this up. 

“Are you serious?” Bucky asks turning his knees in slightly and blocking Steve’s access to his prick.  He sounds irritated. 

“Keep your voice down.  And answer the question,” Steve commands.  He’s gotten really used to giving commands. 

“Of course this isn’t because you look like…well, a fucking Adonis.”  Steve is a little proud that Bucky knows who Adonis is; the guy hadn’t exactly been a reader when they attended school together.  “You’re probably the bravest person I’ve ever met.  You can do crazy things that no one else can.  You’re the strongest Commando by far.  I’m so amazed by you and all that you can do.” 

They’re pretty words, but they only apply to Captain America.  Steve Rogers, obviously, isn’t strong without the serum.  He can’t do the crazy things that Bucky implies.  He’s not even brave where it counts; he’d never been brave enough to even get closer to Bucky. 

Now that Steve knows him, he knows he could have.  He knows he could have gone to the movies that Bucky liked, and he could have learned to drink liquor and gone to the bars that Bucky liked.  He could have chatted more with Bucky’s friends.  He could have started up conversations about the things they had in common when Bucky came into the office.  He could have, with time and some bravery, moved in to Bucky’s inner circle. 

But he didn’t. 

He was a coward.

A coward who resorted to this, to risking his life at war and volunteering for an incredibly suspect body-modification experiment, just to get his man.  None of that is bravery; it’s stupidity. 

“You still don’t look happy,” Bucky tells him, closing his pants unhappily.  Steve moves to open them again, wanting to finish what he’d started, but Bucky brushes him away.  “What do you want me to say, Cap?  Because I’ll say it.  I like what we have going here.” 

“You don’t know me,” Steve says, a little broken.  Bucky blinks.  “I mean the me outside of this war.  You don’t know that me.” 

“Do any of us know each other outside of this war?” Bucky asks with a shrug.  It’s a fair point. 

“I want us to know each other outside of this war,” Steve pleads.  “It’s important to me.” 

Bucky looks into the middle distance for a moment, and Steve would give anything at that moment to know what – or who – he’s seeing in his head.  Then he looks back at Steve and smiles. 

“Listen, Cap, you should know…I got a sweetheart back home.”  Steve tries not to visibly reel. 

“Then what exactly are you doing blackin’ boots with me?” he asks, angry and hurt and hoping that he doesn’t show it.  A part of him wonders if Bucky’s sweetheart is a man or a woman, but he can’t figure out which answer will sting less, so he doesn’t ask.

Bucky plays with his bottom lip between his teeth.  “Well, it’s not official.  It’s just- maybe after the war.  I’m not betrayin’ any trust here, Cap, it’s not like that.” 

Steve thinks of the other Commandos and how they differentiate between their “serious” sweethearts and the other girls they know back home. 

“You got a picture of your sweetheart?” 

“No,” Bucky flushes. 

“You write letters?” 

“Well, one.”  Bucky continues to twist his lip between his teeth, and it betrays how uncomfortable he is with the conversation.  “Didn’t get a response.  Don’t know why I thought I’d get one.”  Steve’s spirits calm slightly.  Whoever Bucky wants back home, it doesn’t sound like he or she is waiting for him.  All is fair in love and war, they say, and Steve still has a chance to make Bucky fall for him before he makes any real commitments.  It feels greedy, but he’s stubborn and not willing to give Bucky up for some distant love who can’t be bothered to write a homesick soldier back. 

“I do want this, Cap,” Bucky says when he’s been silent for too long.  Bucky brings a hand to Steve’s face and traces the sweat line from his temple to his jaw.  “This ain’t just comfort, although it’s been damn good for that.  Honest.  A man ain’t limited in how many people he can feel things for.  I wanna know you too, know you outside of the war.  Tell me about yourself.”

Steve smiles back at him and puts a hand on Bucky’s knee, trying to force the jealousy aside and be with Bucky in this moment.  He still has a heart to win, he reminds himself.

 “Okay.  I’m an orphan and an only child.  I like to draw.  The newsreels are my favorite at the movies.  I was teacher’s pet in school.”  He continues to list facts about himself, saying everything but, “I’m from Brooklyn,” and “I’ve been in love with you half our lives.”

“I have a sister, and she’s got six kids,” Bucky tells him later.  “Three of them are step-kids.  I’m from Brooklyn.  I live in this shitty Irish neighborhood with some good bars and grocers.  I’m a dockworker,” he says, almost embarrassed.  Steve wants to laugh.  He knows Bucky outside of the war already, but it’s interesting to hear him describe his own life.  Steve’s memorized all these details, but Bucky doesn’t list them in the order he would have predicted, nor does he give them their expected degrees of importance.    

They’re still talking when the Hydra agents burst in, because Steve and Bucky are being poor look-outs.  In the ensuing melee, all the Commands are woken up and come out shooting in their underwear. 

Steve isn’t sure how to go about winning someone’s heart, but he tries.  He thinks about his parents at their happiest, and tries to do exactly what he’d learned from them both.  He listens to Bucky when he needs to vent about the waiting and freezing and killing that make up war; he buys him little gifts like chocolate, which Bucky loves, and cigarettes and stationary; he catches Bucky’s eye and smiles at him when no one is looking. 

Bucky always smiles back, and he always accepts the presents with a dopey grin.  “You treat me good, Cap,” he says one day when Steve manages to get him both a chocolate bar and a new lighter.  Better than the sweetheart who doesn’t write you back?, Steve wants to ask.  But he doesn’t.  He never brings that up again, and Bucky follows his lead.  In the most selfish way, Steve wants Bucky to forget about anyone back in Brooklyn and see how much Steve loves him. 

He thinks the message might be getting through when Bucky gives him a gift of his own – a set of used water colors that the Commandos make fun of until Steve paints the surrounding, bleak landscape and they fight over who gets to send it home to his mama. 

 

In France, they get to share a tent, though they have to be quiet and still because of the thinness of the material.  Steve lies on his back and Bucky uses his chest like a pillow, puffing away at a cigarette that would have sent Steve into fits of asthma fourteen months ago.   Steve fondly looks down at Bucky’s lips as they wrap around the smoke. 

“You’re beautiful,” he tells him in an undertone that won’t travel beyond this tiny space they’ve created for themselves. 

“You’re alright,” Bucky says with an audible, unmistakable grin. 

“I got nothing on you, Bucky Barnes.”  Bucky hums and pokes at the washboard muscles of Steve’s stomach. 

“And somehow, I never see you do a sit-up,” he half-complains, half-teases.  “You’re an army miracle, aren’t you, Cap?”  It’s too close to the truth for Steve to acknowledge.  Sometimes Bucky and the Commandos want to know about Captain America’s origins, but they’re highly classified, even from his unit.  Also, telling Bucky that he used to be small might call up a memory that Steve isn’t confident enough to reveal yet.   So despite Bucky’s hinting, Steve keeps mum. 

“Why do you still call me ‘Cap’ when we’re alone?” he asks to subtly shift the subject.  “You know my name.” 

“Steven Robinson, blood type O, no family,” Bucky recites. 

“Or just ‘Steve,’” Steve answers wryly. 

“I don’t really think of you as Steve.  You’re too awesome for a normal name, Cap,” Bucky tells him.  He’s joking, but Steve wonders if that means that Bucky thinks of ‘Steve’ as a name for weak, uninteresting people.  Like some of the Steves he’d known in Brooklyn.  Or maybe just one. 

When the entire camp is dark and quiet around them, Steve takes a chance and slides his hand into the back of Bucky’s pants.  Positioning his thigh between Bucky’s, he rubs at his hole and encourages Bucky forward.  Bucky stuffs a hand in his mouth and grinds against Steve’s leg silently, screwing his eyes shut as his orgasm creeps closer. 

Steve pulls his hand away and bites at his mouth, swallowing all of Bucky’s short and shallow moans as he ruts and swivels his hips and eventually comes in his pants. 

“Cap,” he whimpers. 

“Steve,” Steve encourages.  Bucky’s eyes flick open and Steve thinks he sees a flash of something before Bucky’s eyes dilate with pleasure. 

“Steve,” he agrees, sounding slightly off.  Something in his expression scrunches as he runs his eyes over Steve’s face, before it smoothes out and Bucky is crashing their lips together again. 

Steve comes with Bucky’s hand on his prick minutes later, and then Bucky rolls firmly back to his own side of the tent and gives Steve his back. 

“Night,” Steve says, the desire to give Bucky space to work though his mood warring with his desire to cuddle more. 

“Night, Cap,” Bucky tells him quietly. 

 

A few weeks later, they intercept a transmission about a train in the Swiss Alps.  Arnim Zola is supposed to be aboard, and Steve is doubly ready to go after him when Bucky hints that Zola had been the main one to torture him in the Hydra prison in the name of experimentation. 

“What did he do to you?” he asks Bucky when they’ve drifted away from the other Commandos.  Bucky looks at the ground.

“I don’t think I want to talk about that, Cap.  No offense.”

“Bucky, tell me,” Steve uses his Captain voice.  Bucky’s head comes up and his eyes flash. 

“You won’t tell me what they did to you either.  Why you can jump thirty feet.  Why you could lift the tank.  Why, when you punch guys, they stay down.”  It’s a harsh reminder that their relationship still holds secrets, more secrets than Bucky even knows about. 

“Okay,” Steve says with a nod.  “Okay.  That’s fair.”  They make up later that night; there’s nowhere for them to be truly alone, but they wander about a quarter mile away from their men, and embrace in the snow. 

“I’ll tell you everything after the war,” Steve promises, breathing Bucky’s scent and nuzzling into his soft hair.  Without tonic, it’s messy and straight.  Bucky usually combs it back with water, and he’ll be needing a military regulation haircut when they get back to Allied territory. 

He still has doubts that things will be the same between him and Bucky after the war, much less after Bucky knows the truth.  But he can’t love Bucky and lie to him anymore.  It’s too much.  And he honestly can’t keep wondering if Bucky will leave him; he has to know and move on from there. 

The next day they prepare to zip line onto the train.  Steve thinks about the awful roller coaster at Coney Island that he’s only ridden once in his life, and thinks that, when he tells Bucky...and if Bucky’s still his fellow…they’ll go to Coney Island after the war and ride the damn roller coaster.  And Steve will be able to handle it without throwing up, because he’ll have zip lined onto a moving train.

Getting onto the train is the easy part; getting into it is harder.  There are numerous Hydra agents, armed to the teeth, and they aim for Bucky over Steve because he’s smaller and slower.  Bucky picks up Steve’s shield at one point to deflect a blast, and Steve’s last happy thought is that it’s a good look for him. 

The next blast sends him flying out of the train, and Steve can’t get to him in time.  Every fiber of him screams when the railing disengages with the train and Bucky tumbles down into the mountains below.  He sees his body falling, spinning, and thank God, he doesn’t see him hit.  He thinks he’d have lost his own grip if he’d seen Bucky hit the ground. 

Zola’s capture is perfunctory; Steve is emotionless throughout the capture and initial interrogation.  He’s emotionless when they bring Zola to the SSR.  He’s emotionless when he sits in a bombed-out bar and gathers up all the unbroken bottles.  The emotions come when he remembers Bucky’s last night before shipping out, and the tears follow thereafter. 

“You’re taking Barnes’ death a little hard,” Peggy tells him an hour later.  Steve doesn’t know how she found him, but if anyone had, he’s glad it’s her.  Peggy still flirts with him sometimes even though she doesn’t seem to have any expectations, and she’s the only one over here who knew Steve Before.  It counts for something. 

“Are people talking?” he asks, not really caring. 

“How could they not be.  Any truth to it?” she asks, sitting down across from him. 

Even though he’s not drunk, Steve tells her everything.  He tells her about doing Bucky’s sentence diagramming when he was thirteen and getting a job at the docks because Bucky worked there when he was seventeen.  He tells her about hating his little body after Bucky rejected him.  He tells her about romancing Bucky during the war and deciding to become Captain America instead of owning up to Steve Rogers’s less-than-admirable past. 

“Goodness,” she says when he’s done.  “You really made a mess of that, Steve.”  And he laughs, doesn’t think he can but it bubbles out of him. 

“I was going to tell him.  I really was.  After the war.”

“There are no guarantees in war.  Are you sure you didn’t promise him anything just because you yourself doubted that both of your would really survive?”  It’s not exactly right, and Steve had always imagined that if either of them would die, it would be him, the leader.  But maybe he had doubted that there would be an after-the-war to go back to. 

Until the morning of the train.  Then, he’d been certain.  He’d banked on Coney Island. 

“Steve, I’m sorry.  I truly am.  But allow your lover the dignity of his choice.  While you kept some things from him, what you’ve done as Captain America is real and it’s important.  Barnes believed in it, and he gave his life for it.  And we need Captain America to get out of this bar and come back to headquarters, and continue the cause that Barnes was fighting for.” 

“You’re very good at pep talks,” Steve tells her, smiling again as he wipes the tears from his eyes with a dirty napkin. 

“And you’re very good at depressing a girl.  I tell you, all the good ones are queer,” she says as she extends a hand and goes through the motions of helping Steve stand up. 

“Did I break your heart, Peggy,” he teases as they walk back to base.

“Threw it on the floor and stomped on it,” she agrees playfully. 

 

The happiness that she brings him and the peace that comes with confessing don’t last. 

A week later, Steve fights the Red Skull on a bomb-laden airplane heading for his home, and when the Skull is down he realizes that he can’t turn the plane around. 

“I have to put it in the water!” he tells Peggy over the comm. 

“Steve, how dare you, you can turn the damn plane around!” she snaps at him.  But he thinks about what will happen if he manages to turn the plane around and land it safely somewhere. 

He’ll go back to fighting. 

The war will end; they’re probably going to win it.

He’ll go home to Brooklyn with a new body and a new skill set.

And Bucky will be a frozen splatter on a mountain thousands of miles away. 

He just thinks that it will be easier if he, and the plane, make their home right here in the ocean. 

Peggy is yelling at him over the comm about how there’s still plenty to live for, and Barnes wouldn’t want this, and Steve’s going to be a liar and a coward. 

The word penetrates his conscious: coward.  Steve is a coward, and this is the coward’s way out. 

He looks at the controls in front of him and realizes that he’s tired of the cowardice that defines his life-changing decisions.  He wants to be brave.  He snaps out of his black mood as the will to live overpowers him, and he yanks at the controls to pull them up. 

There’s not enough time.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Steve wakes up in the 21st century.  He’s remembered as a hero, not a coward. Bucky Barnes is remembered as a devoted sidekick, not Captain America’s love interest.  So Steve figures that he owes Peggy a solid. 

He goes to see her, and it’s devastating when she barely remembers him.  In her more lucid moments, she remembers Steve, and she remembers that he’d had a secret. 

“I shouldn’t think too hard about it, though?” she asks.  Steve bites his lip and then nods. 

“I’d appreciate if you didn’t.” 

He’s on a new team called the Avengers; all the Howling Commandos are dead.  It’s startling when your closest friends have lived long and full lives without you.  But the Avengers are a different kind of team; as erratic and mixed as the Commandos had been, the Avengers are composed of a self-created billionaire robot-man, a Norse god, an anger monster, and two assassins.  Steve finds himself liking them more than he’s expected, and they’re a fearsome team when everyone is at the top of their game.

A few weeks into being a team, they save New York City from aliens.  Steve trudges back to his new Brooklyn apartment in a daze after that mission.  He’s having trouble finding his place in this new world, but if he can save the city of his birth, then he thinks the rest will come in time. 

It does.  He makes new friends, and they help acclimate him.  They show him books and movies and music, and he loves it.  It’s all at his fingertips when he finally understands how to use the internet. 

Brooklyn has changed a lot, but it’s still Brooklyn.  Steve travels his familiar haunts and sees that most of them are gone or altered, but he can still recognize his Brooklyn in pieces and parts.  His boarding house is gone, but an equally terrible high-rise apartment complex has sprung up in its place.  The bar where he and Bucky went on Bucky’s last night is a high-end restaurant now, to which Steve invites Natasha and doesn’t answer when she asks about the connection.  The docks are closed, but when he walks by at night, he thinks he can still see the shuffle of bodies hoisting cartons in the dark.

It feels, for a second, like he could step forward and Bucky will come into view, sweating and swearing. 

He likes that in this century, queer people can be open, and they have rights.  Tony told him to say ‘gay,’ not ‘queer,’ and then wants to know why Steve is asking. 

He doesn’t ‘come out’ (a new term he learned from the internet), positive that it won’t matter.  He’s not interested in anyone in this century.  He’s not sure how you get over something as deeply staked in you as the different permutations of his relationship with Bucky. 

For two years, he’s content.  He has a cause and he has friends and he has a place to live and enough to eat.  Steve will always be a child of the depression, and it’s made a lasting impact on what he considers ‘okay.’

He tries not to think about the plane.  It’s his lowest moment, and he’s ashamed.  Even though it enabled him to be here, in this new world, helping the City and the Avengers, he’s ashamed that, for a few seconds, he meant to die.  It’s not fair that he gets to come back, and Bucky doesn’t. 

 

Bucky comes back two years into Steve’s second life.  He comes back wrong; he comes back as a brainwashed killer.  Steve’s thrilled that Bucky isn’t a frozen stain on a mountain, but he doesn’t see how this is much better.  He doesn’t recognize his cocky Brooklyn boy or his Commando.  He thinks they’re buried so deep within the Winter Soldier that he’ll never get Bucky out. 

The Winter Soldier surrenders to what’s left of SHIELD after he pulls Steve out of the Potomac.  Seeing Steve hurt has clearly snapped something loose in his head, and Steve feels like he holds his breath for a week while Hill’s people examine the soldier and deprogram him. 

“He’s remembering you,” a psychologist tells Steve when the week is up.  “I think it would be good for him to continue regaining his memories around you.  You two were partners for over a year; it’s the most concrete connection he has to his old life.”  So Steve agrees to move into Stark Tower with Bucky and share an apartment with him.  They each get their own room.

The other Avengers are thrilled to have “the full set” as Tony puts it.  Steve starts to research the legend of Captain America and Bucky Barnes, and finds that they’re one of the most dynamic duos in all of movies and literature.  Dozens of books and scholarly articles have been written on their partnership during the war.  Dozens of interviews with people who had worked with them are circulating on the internet.  Dozens of authentic Cap/Bucky pictures are for sale on something called eBay.

But as fascinated as the modern world is, no one has ever looked up their enlistment paperwork and discovered that Steven Rogers (his name and backstory now declassified) and James Barnes lived and worked in the same five-block radius their entire pre-war lives. 

Bucky doesn’t like the stories, especially the ones that portray him as a hero.  In his mind, he’s a bloody, poisonous presence in history, and he punches the television with his metal arm when he catches Steve watching a documentary about the Howling Commandos.

Bucky is quiet and taciturn most days.  He doesn’t like leaving the apartment, he doesn’t like too many people in the room, and he doesn’t like when Steve is injured.  The therapists tell Steve that this last one is a very good thing – it shows that he’s capable of caring. 

Steve makes sure that he has (or attempts to have) a conversation with Bucky at least once a day.  Most of the time, the conversations are about silly, 21st century things, like “Who are the real housewives?” but occasionally, they talk about the past. 

“We were intimate,” Bucky tells him one day, and Steve’s heart soars, because there’s no one he could have heard that from.  It’s unclear how much Bucky really remembers and how much other people are influencing him through suggestion, but Bucky definitely remembers that.

“Yeah, we were.”  Steve doesn’t know what else to say.  He’s thought about how he would handle it if Bucky came to him with this, but he’s not sure it will help Bucky more to pretend those feelings are in the past or acknowledge that he still has them. 

Bucky looks at him, assessing.

“How serious?”

“Pretty serious,” Steve says, still playing it cool.  “At least on my part.  Lasted a little over a year, so, you seemed pretty serious too.”

“Did you love…Bucky?” Bucky asks.  He has a tendency to slip between referring to himself in the third and first persons when he’s talking about his past.  Steve doesn’t know if it’s an indicator of how clear his memories are, or how much responsibility he wants to take for his actions. 

“I did,” Steve answers.  Then he shows his hand.  “I do.” 

Bucky shifts uncomfortably in his seat at the kitchen table.  Steve continues to methodically wash the dishes, scrubbing a little harder than necessary as he waits for a response. 

“Is that why you’re helping me?”  He sounds like he’s had an epiphany.  Steve’s chest hurts when he realizes that Bucky must have been wondering why Steve was living with him and talking to him for months.  He must have felt like he didn’t deserve it. 

“I’m not helping you because I expect something from you, Bucky.  I’m helping you because I’ve always wanted to help you.  Nothing’s changed for me.”  Bucky looks down at his arm.  “Nothing,” Steve says firmly. 

After a few minutes of silence broken only by the gentle sloshing of water, Bucky clears his throat. 

“Can I tell you something without you getting upset?” 

“Of course,” Steve says, unsure why Bucky thinks he’s going to have a problem with whatever memory he’s seeing in his head right now.  Steve hasn’t shirked away from anything Bucky’s memories have thrown at them yet. 

“I don’t think Bucky loved you back.  At least not the way you felt about him.” 

Steve’s chest constricts as he feels his head nod. 

“That’s disappointing, but not surprising,” he says when he can trust himself to speak.  Then, “It’s a good sign if you can remember how you felt about things.”  Bucky’s watching him quizzically, and Steve hopes his body language isn’t radiating how much his heart hurts right now. 

It isn’t surprising, and that’s the saddest part.  It confirms the fears that used to worm their way into Steve’s brain at night, even with Bucky snoring lightly beside him, that Bucky didn’t feel the same way about Captain America, or about Steve Rogers, or about whatever combination of the two Steve felt like most that day.  Always hiding; always pretending.  And how could Bucky be expected to love someone who wasn’t even fully real and sure as hell wasn’t honest with him?

“Sorry,” Bucky apologizes, so apparently Steve is showing his hurt in the lines of his body.  He shrugs. 

“It doesn’t matter now.  I still know how I feel, and regardless of whatever you feel or felt, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to help you get your memories back and find what you want to do with your life now.”  He wipes his hands on a dish towel as Bucky continues, in his own flawed, oblivious way, to attempt to cheer Steve up. 

“I did like you.  A lot.  That I know.  Everything connected to you is positive.  That’s why, on the Helicarrier…”  He trails off, then switches perspectives again.  “Bucky liked you.  If there hadn’t been anyone else, he probably would have felt the same way.” 

That’s really all Steve can hear for now.  Bucky’s words ringing in his ears, he says goodbye and heads down to the gym.  As his fists slam into the punching bag over and over again, he tries to think about anything besides the unexpected bombshells Bucky had casually dropped on him over grilled cheese. 

Bucky hadn’t loved Steve.  Okay, Steve can live with that.  He’d clearly felt something at least.  But it’s harder to make peace with the fact that the mysterious sweetheart had enough of a grip on Bucky that Steve’s best efforts hadn’t been enough.  He wasn’t enough. 

 _Who_? his brain screams with each hit into the vinyl-covered sand.  A girl back in Brooklyn?  A man back in Brooklyn?  Steve usually knew when Bucky was going steady with someone, but none of them stand out any more than the others.  Then again, had it been a man, Bucky would have kept that quiet.

Oh, god.  What if it was a man?  What if it was the man who’d taught Bucky how to open himself up and suck a man’s prick and-

The sandbag explodes against the wall, and Steve wipes the sweat out of his eyes to see Natasha leaning against the wall and staring at him. 

“Everything okay, Cap?” she asks.  He notices that he’s breathing heavily and erratically.  He forces himself to calm down. 

For a moment, he thinks about confiding in her; it had worked with Peggy when he had grief on his chest.  But that thought puts things into perspective for him: Bucky isn’t dead.  Bucky’s alive, and he’s improving, and so what if Steve hadn’t been the love of his life?  Bucky is in no condition to be in a relationship with anyone right now.  Their feelings are unrelated to Steve’s desire to get him healthy and whole. 

“Just thinking about Pierce,” he lies, and she nods. 

He goes back upstairs after cleaning up the mess, and Bucky’s moved six feet to the sofa.  He lifts his head up, expression pensive, from the sofa’s arm when Steve comes in. 

“You got upset,” he says forlornly. 

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t talk about the fact that we’re basically exes and just concentrate on our friendship.  That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?” Steve tries to force levity into his tone. 

“You reminded Bucky of him,” he tells Steve.  “I wasn’t trying to upset you; I was actually trying to reassure you that he did care about you.”  So it is a man, and it’s too much with the adrenaline still flowing through Steve’s veins. 

“Bucky, I don’t want to talk about this.  Can we please talk about something else.”  Unfortunately, when Bucky is sifting through his patchy memories, he sometimes gets stuck.

“The guy he wanted is dead now, anyways.”  Steve almost snaps at him to leave it alone, but then he hears a current of sadness and backtracks fast. 

As hard as it’s going to be for Steve, if the Bucky in front of him had loved someone and is now coming to terms with the fact that he’s gone, he needs a friend.  Someone who’s going to support him and not tell him to be quiet because it’s inconvenient in light of his personal feelings. 

“Have you been thinking about him lately?” he asks a minute later when he’s sorted through his issues.  Bucky shrugs and then nods. 

“Do you know what happened to him after you fell?”  This time Bucky shakes his head.  Now that Steve is talking about it, he seems to have lost his words. 

“Do you want to do some research?” Steve asks, hoping the answer is no but prepared to go through with it.

“No,” Bucky says then.  “I don’t want to know if it was something bad.”  He stands up and heads for his room.  “I like the idea of him living a long life and getting married and stuff.”  The door closes behind him.

Well, Steve thinks as he sinks into the spot vacated by Bucky, still indented and warm from his body, Bucky’s memories are returning and his emotions are norming.  It’s good news all around. 

They spend the next several days awkwardly avoiding anything close to Bucky’s romantic past until it doesn’t seem so loaded anymore.  Steve deals and renews his efforts to involve Bucky in team activities, catch him up on history and pop culture, and integrate him into 21st century life. 

They’re at a grocery store in Manhattan, giving Bucky a chance to get used to both crowds and the barrage of consumer choices that Bucky never had as a kid or an assassin, when Steve puts a canister of Ovaltine into their cart. 

“What’s that?” Bucky asks him, eyes darting around and assessing the threat potential of the other shoppers.  Most of the other shoppers are mothers with anywhere from one to five children stuffed into their carts; it’s a slow time of the day, because throwing Bucky into a truly crowded ShopRite doesn’t sound like a good idea for anyone. Steve lets him do the eye thing and doesn’t intervene. 

“It’s Ovaltine.  Like chocolate milk.  You used to love it,” he says as he adds a box of instant coffee that Bucky likes more than coffee grounds to the cart. 

“When did I get a chance to drink chocolate milk in the war?” Bucky asks with a skeptical smile. 

Steve freezes.  That’s not from the war.  That’s from bagging groceries where Mrs. Barnes had shopped in ’29. 

“You told us about it.  Used to talk about food all the time,” he fibs.  The second part, at least, is true. 

After that, he commits to the basics of the story that everyone knows; Cap and Bucky met when Cap rescued him from a Hydra base in the war.  They were inseparable from that point on.  He knows that he promised to tell Bucky after the war, but he thinks that his revelation would complicate things in a way that won’t help Bucky’s memories right now.   

Maybe down the road, he tells himself.  When Bucky can separate out truth from fiction on his own, and when connecting two different parts of his life with one person won’t confuse the hell out of Bucky. 

But weeks turn into months, which turn into a year, and it never seems like a good time.  Bucky gradually joins the Avengers as a back-up like Sam; he and Steve hang out more and find things they like to do besides fighting and therapy; and more and more of Bucky’s memories come back, some of which leave him smiling and tapping his foot to an unheard dance melody, and some of which leave him screaming and hiccupping messy tears in the middle of the night while Steve hammers on his door and sometimes makes good on his threat to break it down. 

 

“Okay,” Bucky tells him one Saturday morning while Steve makes them coffee and Bucky solves all of the newspaper’s Sudoku puzzles (in pen) before Steve can even get a look.  “I think I’m ready to learn more about Captain America and Bucky Barnes.” 

“Are you going to break the TV again?” Steve teases.  He hopes the answer is no, because Fury will probably ground Bucky if he hears that he lost his cool over a documentary. 

“No,” Bucky answers, and then pushes the paper in Steve’s direction.  Steve takes it and gets a shock when he sees a front-page article announcing that the traveling Captain America exhibit is coming to the Museum of the City of New York. 

“You want to go to this?” Steve asks him with a raised eyebrow.  After declining to participate in the design of the exhibit, more due to Avengers conflicts than a true lack of appreciation, Steve hasn’t followed news of its success. 

“Could be fun,” Bucky says as he gnaws on the end of the pen he’s been using to fly through the puzzles.  It makes him look boyish, and the hair falling into his eyes completes the look.  Even as a boy, Bucky hadn’t looked boyish, working jobs to support his family and exposed to the cruel realities of the world far too early.  The flash of fragility is one more reminder of just how much Bucky’s been through and how much he’s still fighting for stability of his moods and memories. 

Steve stares warmly at him for a minute before catching himself and overcompensating. 

“Yeah!  Sure, let’s go today.” 

“It’s going to be crowded today,” Bucky says with a frown. 

“Please, I got you to ride the subway last week.  I think you’ve worked your way up to this.”  Bucky shrugs and throws the pen onto the table.  Steve finds the indentations from his molars both disgusting and adorable.

“We should probably dress down so we don’t get recognized, right?” he asks as he takes his coffee from Steve and pulls the paper back.

“Unless you want to become part of the exhibit,” Steve says, still too cheerfully.  Bucky’s idea is growing on him, however; if nothing else, it will give him new material to make fun of Steve, and that always puts him in a good mood. 

They dress in hoodies and baseball caps, and neither of them shave.  They walk to the museum because it’s a beautiful spring day, and as they wait in line for the exhibit, Steve convinces Bucky to help him name all the pigeons trotting around the courtyard and stealing food from tourists. 

“Are you ready for this?” Steve asks him as they walk in.  “Now, I don’t know exactly what’s in here, but if you see anything about the USO, at least let me explain before you judge.” 

They walk through a room of black-and-white action photographs from the war, Captain America the only colorized figure in each one. 

“That’s Bucky,” Bucky points to the figure at Steve’s left in nearly every picture.  It’s more so that no one will hear him say ‘that’s me’ at this point than a true haziness as to his identity.  Bucky’s almost exclusively speaking in first person now, only referring to the very early Winter Soldier as ‘he.’ 

“Bucky’s my favorite!” a little kid says behind them, possibly overhearing the comment.  Steve smiles at Bucky who looks embarrassed but not angry. 

The next room contains uniforms from each of the Commandos, one of Steve’s old motorcycles, and plenty of artifacts from their time as a unit. 

“I want that knife back,” Bucky whispers to Steve as he points into a display case featuring items found in Bucky’s personal effects.  Steve laughs as he moves closer to look.  The case also has a letter from Bucky’s mother, a worn-looking shaving kit, yellowed stationary, and a paystub from the docks for some reason. 

In his own belongings, Steve finds the compass with a picture of Peggy glued to the inside of the lid. 

“Something you want to tell me, Steve?” Bucky asks with a wicked grin. 

“I didn’t do that!” he protests.  Bucky squints his eyes and looks at the compass, thinking.

“Morita,” he says.  Steve snaps his fingers and points at Bucky. 

“You’re getting good at this remembering thing.” 

The day is going perfectly; Bucky hasn’t flipped out over his heroic treatment, and they’re having a good time.  Bucky doesn’t particularly want to go look at the memorial wall dedicated to him, but Steve chalks that more up to the surreal-ness of the situation as he too skirts around the display.  He doesn’t really want to relive the day of the train, and he knows everything the wall could possibly have to tell him. 

They’re still chuckling over a video of the two of them together, trying their hardest to remember what they’d been laughing at, when they enter the next room and see a digital image of Steve at his current height and weight transform into a digital image of pre-serum Steve. 

He freezes for a second, realizing that he should have expected this and that he still hasn’t gotten around to explaining this part of his life to Bucky.  Turning, he opens his mouth to make a joke about forgetting to mention it, and he sees Bucky staring wide-eyed at the image. 

“So maybe I should have mentioned this…” he trails off as Bucky walks away without a backwards look.  When Steve catches up to him, the image has rotated again, and Bucky is looking at Steve in his post-serum glory.  “I really can explain this,” Steve tells him as Bucky practically pushes a teenager girl out of the way and starts to read the sign next to the display.  When the images swap out again, he turns to Steve, his eyes all pupils.

And then he’s gone. 

Steve whips his head back and forth, trying to see where Bucky’s gone.  He catches a glimpse of his back as Bucky sprints from the exhibit, security yelling after him.  Steve tries to push his way politely through the dense crowd of spectators as he sees Bucky round a corner, and then there’s no point, because he remembers there being an emergency exit there. 

Steve walks home in a very different mood.  He has no idea where Bucky is, and he’s not going to attempt to track him down right now.  He fires off a quick text to Bucky saying ‘I’m sorry, I can explain,’ and isn’t surprised when their floor of the tower is empty upon his arrival. 

Bucky returns late that night, still wearing his museum disguise, and Steve looks up from the book he hadn’t been reading. 

“There a plate for you in the microwave,” he says after several minutes of silence.  Bucky is hovering in the entrance to the living room, staring at the TV on mute.  Steve doesn’t remember what he’s ostensibly watching.  When Bucky doesn’t move, Steve gets up and goes to the kitchen to warm the food up. 

“I have some stuff to say to you,” he tells Bucky when he comes back to the living room with a warm plate of chicken parmesan and vegetables, and at least Bucky is sitting down now.  He hasn’t taken his hat or his heavy sweatshirt off yet. 

Bucky accepts the food and the fork as Steve rubs his hand over his eyes. 

“So, I was all of one hundred and ten pounds before the war.  I was a small guy.  In order to fight, I had to go through this experiment with Dr. Erskine and Howard Stark.  It made me bigger and it gave me super-strength.” 

“Yeah, I learned that today,” Bucky says flatly.  He cut into the chicken with the side of his fork, and the utensil clanks against the plate. 

“But no one wanted to put me in the fight at first.  They had me selling war-bonds and traveling around with a propaganda circus.  When I finally got to Europe, I finally got the chance to fight.  And I was good at it, so they brought me into the war and gave me a title and a squad.  Everything else you know from there is true.” 

“You weren’t who you said you were,” Bucky accuses. 

“Do you really think anyone would have believed me, or respected me, if they knew I was a science experiment?  I had to prove myself to a lot of people, including myself.  In the interest of the team and the mission, I kept my past to myself.” 

Bucky puts his plate on the coffee table having only eaten two bites.

“Yeah, let’s talk about your past.  Let’s talk about the fact that I’d known you my entire life and you didn’t once think to mention that.”  Bucky grows in volume until he’s yelling his words.  He makes an abortive gesture with his hands and then gets to his feet.  He stands in front of Steve and leans down to angrily invade his personal space; Steve lets him.

“You must have thought I was a complete, fucking idiot.  Is that how things between us started?  You wanted to see how stupid I was?”  He shoves at Steve’s chest, which doesn’t do anything.  The resistance makes him mad, and he shoves again with the force of his serum behind it. 

“No, Bucky, I promise that’s not what happened.”

“You already knew about me!” Bucky spits at him as he backs off and starts pacing back and forth in front of Steve.  “You knew about me and boys!  No wonder you took to me so quickly – you knew you had an easy thing right in front of you.  Wasn’t good enough for you in Brooklyn, but in the war, without a lot of options, hey.  Barnes’ll do.” 

Then he kicks the television.  Predictably, it flies into the wall and shatters.  Steve barely notices, caught up in the fact that Bucky actually remembers little Steve.  He remembers the conversation they’d had about those men seeing Bucky by the club. 

“You’re wrong.  I should have told you who I was, but I didn’t want to ruin it.”

“So that justifies lying to me?  For a year!  I could have been court-martialed, but you didn’t care as long as you were getting some.” 

“It wasn’t just about the sex, Bucky!” Steve shouts back.  Bucky responds by slamming his metal fist into Steve’s gut and doubling him over. 

“You don’t get it, Steve, you’re it!  You’re him.  You’re the guy I was obsessed with in Brooklyn, the guy I never had a chance with because you were too smart, too moral, too clean, too fucking perfect for me!  And when I met Cap, he’d just saved me and he was beautiful and he reminded me of you in so many ways – but he wanted me!  You never fucking did.  You never stooped that low.”  Steve straightens up, stunned, just as Bucky brings his foot up between Steve’s legs.  And then the anger drains from his voice. 

“I couldn’t even fall for you.  Because of you.  How messed up is that?”  Steve sinks to the floor and holds his groin with one hand and forces his eyes to unclench and look at Bucky. 

“You didn’t recognize me,” he tells him.  “I wasn’t going to hide anything, but then you didn’t recognize me.  I wanted you to notice me for years.  Of course I didn’t tell you; I didn’t want it to be over.” 

“I can’t do this,” Bucky says after staring at him, chest heaving, for several seconds.  “I don’t-I can’t fucking believe this.”

“I’ve loved you since we were children,” Steve tells him as he continues to clutch at the pain in his groin, forcing earnestness into each word.  “I’m sorry that I thought you’d recognize me.  I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you who I was.  But I need you to believe that.  I have loved-”

Bucky lashes out his foot again, and Steve catches it this time, yanking Bucky down and pinning him to the carpet.  “Stop hitting me.  Calm down.  We’ll figure this out.  Easy, Bucky.”  He continues to soothe Bucky as the smaller man struggles underneath him, and he realizes that Bucky is crying even as he lashes out.  When Bucky finally stops fighting him, he lies on top of him and holds him tightly until Bucky’s sobs taper off. 

“Get off me,” he finally says, his voice raspy but tear-free.  Steve rolls away, and Bucky is instantly on his feet and heading for the door.  Steve notices that his hat’s been knocked off, but apart from that, he’s still wearing his incognito costume from a much brighter start to their day.  He disappears through the front door, and Steve tries to collect his wits. 

He doesn’t go to sleep that night, just lies on Bucky’s bed and wonders how they’d gotten everything so wrong. 

 

When Bucky isn’t home three days later, he takes out his phone.  ‘My name is Steven Rogers.  I’m from Brooklyn.  I want you,’ he texts Bucky.

The next day, after Bucky helps the Avengers take down a fleet of Doombots, he texts Bucky.  ‘I put an extra dollar in your pay when your sister was sick, and then I felt guilty, so I took it out of my pay.  I want you.’

The next day, when Tony tells Steve that Bucky’s been in for a tune-up on the arm and left, he texts Bucky.  ‘The double-date you roped me into was my first, and only date.  I want you.’ 

And so it continues.  For nearly a month, Steve texts Bucky facts about their shared past, the lives they’d lived with very little overlap but apparently a great deal of awareness. 

‘I was devastated when you looked at my scrawny body and walked away.  I want you,’ he texts Bucky one day.  He gets his first response: ‘I walked away and thought about your scrawny body all shift.  Wished I had a chance.’ 

The next day, hoping for another response, Steve texts something from the war. “I wanted to crash the plane because I couldn’t bear to lose you.  I changed my mind, but it was too late.  I want you.’ 

Bucky comes home that evening, looking like he’s been living and sleeping on the run.  It stings that he’s been doing so to avoid Steve. 

“You’re a moron,” he tells Steve, leaning in the doorway. 

“I think we’re both morons.  How did we miss every chance we got?”  Bucky comes forward stops inches away from Steve; he can smell Bucky’s sweat from here. 

“I’m still angry and confused.  With you and with myself.”  He bites his lip and looks at the entryway wall.  “But I guess if I finally have a shot with you, I’d be even angrier if I didn’t take it.”  He closes the inches between them and Steve bends to brush their mouths together.  Neither of them make a move to part their lips, just relishing the pressure and texture and warmth. 

“I’m sorry I beat you up,” Bucky whispers a minute later, their faces so close together that Steve’s going a little cross-eyed looking into the blue rings of Bucky’s. 

“It’s okay.  It didn’t actually hurt,” Steve fibs.  Then he catches himself.  It’s probably time to make full-disclosure an important element of their relationship; otherwise, he’ll likely lose it again. 

“It kind of hurt,” he amends.  He pulls Bucky into his arms and rests his chin on the top of his head.  “Sorry for pretending to be two different people.”  Bucky laughs wryly against Steve’s neck. 

“Don’t fucking do it again.”

“I don’t intend to.”  Bucky pull back from the embrace, looking shy. 

“So, uh, what now?”  Steve can’t help it as his eyes dart unconsciously toward his bedroom.  Bucky raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. 

“Let’s go to Coney Island,” Steve says on a whim. 

“Right now?”

“Right now.  Let’s go to Coney Island.  Let’s go back to our part of town.”

Which is how they find themselves strolling, hand-in-hand, down the boardwalk an hour later.  Barely anyone gives them a second glance as they eat cotton candy and Bucky assesses all the games, looking to see how they’re rigged. 

Steve takes his picture with his camera phone as Bucky finally chooses a game and hits every target with an air rifle.  He looks so excited, even though he knew he was going to win, that Steve pulls him into a chaste kiss as he debates which prize he wants to claim. 

“That was our first kiss in Brooklyn,” Bucky tells him when they pull apart, the game proprietor waiting for Bucky to choose and move on. 

“Do I have to wait another eighty years for a second?” Steve asks him, feeling lightheaded on the sugar and the sunset and the moment.  Bucky blushes. 

“Hopefully it won’t take me that long this time around.”  He points to a random prize, a huge, stuffed banana, and makes Steve carry it back to the subway.  He turns to look at Steve as they turn onto Stillwell Ave, and with the bustle of New York behind him and the beginnings of a smirk at one side of his mouth, he looks just like a boy Steve knew long ago for a split second. 

Steve can’t stop grinning as he and the banana head down the stairs to the subway platform.    

**Author's Note:**

> Come play on tumblr: [SkyisGray](http://skyisgray.tumblr.com/)


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